Why isn't the position the color is inside and not outside is not a realist position. as in objective vs subjective realism. Are you saying our subjective reality is not real? — Cavacava

Realism means mind-independence. Physicalism is an objective ontology. Yes, it does need to account for subjectivity, and that's a problem.

I basically agree, though I would note that we mean roughly the same thing when we say that dropping a rock on our foot hurts or that the rose is red, or else ordinary communication would not be possible. — Andrew M

When a rock is dropped on my foot and I say that it hurts, I certainly don't mean the resulting behavior, I mean the felt pain. Similarly, when I comment on the redness of a rose, I don't mean the wavelength of light.

What I'm communicating is the experience, not the behavior or optics. The reason we can communicate experience is because we're human and thus have similar experiences. But you notice how it doesn't always work. Sometimes what one person experiences is not entirely communicable to another. Sometimes we struggle to put into words what we feel.

Sometimes I just don't understand what you're talking about. I can't relate. There is a sense in which we're all our own island, separated from the other by this gulf of lack of understanding that cannot fully be breached by language. What is to be me is not what it is to be you, and you can't know that fully because you don't experience being me, and vice versa. There is definitely a private, unshareable aspect to our being.

Similarly, a behaviorist or physicalist can deny the existence of qualia, while affirming that dropping a rock on your toe hurts and that roses are red. — Andrew M

Going back to this:

Hurting means to feel pain. It's an experience. It can be accompanied with behavior, but not always. It's also not a neurological explanation, because people felt pain before they knew anything about neuroscience.

The rose being red is problematic for the physicalist because the experience of red color isn't part of the physical description of the world. The physicalist is put into a difficult position of defending color realism.

The behaviorist is put into a extremely counter intuitive position of reducing feels to behavior, despite the fact that people do feel plenty of things without behaving in a detectable manner. That's why we can't always tell what people are thinking or feeling. Behaviorism has no answer for that other than to fall back on neuroscience.

In any case, my argument would be that some of our concepts are subjective and not behavioral or physicalist. When I say that it hurts or the rose is red, I mean my experience of feeling pain and seeing red, not howling and jumping around, or a scientific account of optics and reflective surfaces.

I think that alone makes it clear why the behaviorist and physicalist cannot simply redefine consciousness to avoid the hard problem. Instead, they have to argue for reducing experience to behavior or physical explanations.

I don't think behaviorism can possibly succeed, and it's fallen out of favor, with functional cognitive explanations and neuroscience taking it's place. Turns out the black box really does matter.

The jury is still out on physicalism, with some physicalists arguing for nonreductive and emergent accounts of consciousness.

In other words, a behaviorist or physicalist can affirm that consciousness is real, but deny the dualist explanation of consciousness. — Andrew M

But what does a behaviorist mean when when they say that dropping a rock on your toe "hurts"? If they mean you hop up and down and yell, then that's not consciousness. That's simply behavior. It they mean certain nerves are firing resulting in that behavior, it is again not consciousness, it's neurological activity.

In both cases, the behaviorist and physicalist are using the word consciousness to mean something entirely different.

that they're both referring to the same thing but that one of their accounts of what that thing is is mistaken? — Michael

It's easier to see this is not the case if we avoid the word consciousness and stick with qualia and behavior.

It's clear that when speaking of qualia we are not talking about behavior, and vice versa. A behaviorist would deny the existence of qualia, not say that qualia is actually behavior, because that makes no sense.

Surely you accept that when Bob talks about stars being holes in the sky and Mary talks about stars being balls of plasma you accept that they're both referring to the same things — Michael

They're referring to the same phenomenon in the night sky, yes.

Then why is it so hard to accept that when one philosopher talks about consciousness being physical and another philosopher talks about consciousness being non-physical that they're both referring to the same thing — Michael

This started with behaviorism. The physicalist is more challenging, because they might say that there is a physical explanation for consciousness, not that consciousness is brain activity. But we'll stick with equating consciousness to behavior or brain states.

In that case, there isn't a common referent like there is with those lights in the night sky. This is because the behaviorist and physicalist are not talking about the same thing at all. They are referring to behavior when someone is in a wakeful state, or the activity of a brain in a wakeful state.

But consciousness in the qualia or subjective sense is not behavior or brain states. The closest you can get to making this claim work is identity theory of mind where brain states and mental states are said to pick out the same thing somehow, despite differing conceptually.

So your answer is just that they're referring to the same thing? — Michael

If by same "thing", you mean using the same word, then sure. But words can have multiple meanings, and consciousness is one of those words.

I love icecream. I love how the boss schedules these stupid meetings. I love my family. I'm in love with that girl. I love that dancer!

If Bob argues that stars are holes in the sky and Mary argues that stars are balls of plasma, how can they be referring to the same thing? — Michael

They're referring to pinpoints of light in the night sky, but I don't see how the analogy applies to consciousness, other than the use of that word.

No they're not (always). They're saying that the real thing that we refer to by the term "consciousness" is just behaviour/brain states and not some non-physical thing. Just as the real thing that we refer to by the term "star" is a ball of plasma and not some hole in the sky. — Michael

So when we talk about inner, private, subjective states, we're really just talking about behavior or brain states, according to behaviorists or physicalists. Where behavior or brain states are objective.

That's exactly like saying that when we talk about belief/desire, we're really talking about brain states. But they're not the same concepts.

So then the question is what's the referent both sides are talking about? When Dennett argues that consciousness is functional states, and Chalmers argues that consciousness is qualia not reducible to physical, behavioral or functional states, how can they be referring to the same thing?

I understand the star analogy, but what would be the star in this case, since one side means qualia, and the other means behavior or brain activity? I'm not seeing a common referent. Rather, I see the same word "consciousness" being used differently.

We seem at cross purposes. I wasn't talking about the ability to imagine the sounds, sights or feelings of language as such. But sure, braille is another possibility. You could have a feeling of bumps under your fingertips as the equivalent of an inner voice. — apokrisis

I read an interesting short science fiction story set in the future where humans travelling in deep space come across a five million year old escape pod of an alien race thought to be extinct. The pod held an alien in cryostasis. The humans revived it. It was a crab like creature that had no eyes or ears. It primarily detected the world through smell or taste, but it's race was much more advanced.

It ended up using pieces of the pod to synthesize materials and plants, then sampled one of the humans for DNA to grow a human hybrid child that had a vastly larger number of neurons throughout it's body (similar to the alien crab). The child then learned human language, history, technological capabilities and politics from the ship's AI at high speed in a short period of time. After that, it interface with the alien and then communicated its desires back to the humans through the hybrid child.

The humans realized at first they were going to have troubles communicating with the alien because it had no sight or vision, and was crab-like, but luckily the alien was smarter than them.

That's not how it works. If you were to go back to some relevant period in history and tell the people there that stars were luminous spheres of plasma held together by their own gravity, would it be right for them to reject your claim on the grounds that that's not what they mean by "star" and that you're just redefining the word? Of course not. The word "star" refers to some real thing in the world that we just might believe to be something other than what it is (e.g. a hole in the sky, or whatever it was they believed). And in this case, the word "consciousness" refers to some real thing in the world that we just might believe to be something other than what it is. — Michael

I know where you got that from. It's from the eliminative materialism, where beliefs and desires are eliminated from an explanation of in favor or neurological explanations for behavior. But if the discussion is over intentionality in philosophy of mind, then eliminating intentional states means you are redefining what mind is.

In this case, the behaviourist or physicalist is saying that the real thing that we refer to by the word "consciousness" is behaviour or brain states, and that if we believe it to be something else then we're mistaken. You can argue that consciousness isn't these things, but you can't argue that their position relies on a redefinition of "consciousness". — Michael

It is a redefinition of consciousnes because consciousness means subjectivity, and those two things are objective.

So what the behaviorist and physicalist are arguing is that consciousness doesn't exist. But they want to keep using the word, and here the problem is that English allows more than one meaning for conscious, which would be awake versus asleep for the behaviorist.

Notice how Dennnett wants to quine qualia, but still wants to use consciousness to mean functional states. If you quine the subjective away, then human beings are p-zombies, and Dennett has said as much.

A p-zombie by definition is lacking consciousness in the subjective meaning of the word, which is what the behaviorist/physicalist is arguing when they say that consciousness is behavior or brain activity, full stop.

So there was a neural basis established for both language and those conceptual modalities. — apokrisis

But why should language require visual or auditory signs? Humans utilize those two senses heavily, but that doesn't mean they're necessary for language.

But the proper response wouldn't be to confirm or deny the possibility of visualizing an abstract triangle, but to say that dealing with abstract triangles involves a capacity different than 'visualization'. — csalisbury

More to the point, why suppose that the existence or ability of something depends on it's ability to be visualized? I can't visualize a tree falling in the woods with nobody around, but I can conceive of it. I'm sure Hellen Keller was able to conceive of things without utilizing visual or auditory signs.

They're not redefining consciousness, but claiming that what we refer to by consciousness is just behaviour. — Michael

That's redefining consciousness to be behavior. It's not at all what most people mean by consciousness. Nor is it traditionally what is meant in philosophy.

It's similar to the physicalist who might say that what we refer to by consciousness is just electrical activity in the brain. — Michael

This is again redefining consciousness to mean brain activity. It is not the same meaning, not remotely.

It's an easy way to try and win a debate, though. Just change the meaning of the term under question and claim there's no hard problem. But it's bad philosophy.

I recall hearing part of this NPR show about a woman who went to live with a tribe that used directional greetings. They were always saying what direction they had come from or went to. She tried really hard to become competent at always knowing what direction she was headed. The result was that she began to develop a visual bird's eye sense of direction where she could just visualize where she was at from a viewpoint looking down on things.

I didn't know that was an ability you could develop. That blew my mind.

Behaviorists are committed to the idea that exhibiting a particular behavior is a sufficient condition for being conscious, so for them a true p-zombie is an oxymoron. — SophistiCat

Isn't that the same thing as redefining consciousness? Or are behaviorists merely claiming that certain behaviors are indication of consciousness? That you can't have a conscious organism without some resulting behavior, thus p-zombies are impossible? That it would make no sense for a p-zombie philosopher to be discussing qualia.

One should note that not all behavior is conscious, that machines can be made to mock some conscious behavior, that we don't agree on what sort of behavior would qualify a non-human animal for being conscious, and we can't tell whether a comatose patient is sometimes conscious. We also can't consistently guess what someone is thinking.

I can certainly understand where Dennett is coming from in saying that this imagining is verbal in nature, that really just involves considering and understanding certain words and phrases. — Michael

Did you read my Temple Grandin quote where she said that she does not think verbally at all, but only in pictures? She has the opposite condition of aphantasia.

As for your difficult to visualize examples, someone like Grandin might not be able to visualize it, and would therefore have a hard time understanding what is meant, based on some of the other things she has written.

Why wouldn't people differ in their abilities to visualize and verbalize internally?

You know, Einstein had a huge visual cortex apparently. — Wosret

First time in my life I had a bad thought involving Einstein.

The thing about women being 'earthy' and men having their 'heads in the clouds' – women as unified bodies and men as souls attached to bodies – is an old stereotype. The general consensus among modern Westerners is that it's highly sexist and demeaning of women (as is I take it the notion of 'feminine wisdom,' which is supposed to be more earthy, less abstract wisdom). But who knows? Maybe men tend naturally to dualism and abstraction away from their embodied circumstances. — The Great Whatever

The modern trend is to downplay biological differences between men and women in the interest of equality. But that doesn't mean those differences can't be significant in some ways, generally speaking. Maybe one day when the equality issue is fixed, we can be more objective about our biological differences, individually and gender wise.

I recall reading one feminist who would become outraged at any suggestion of biological differences, claiming that culture makes any such differences irrelevant. That sounded quite dogmatic to me, but I understand the motivation for it.

Also relevant is certain empiricists, like Berkeley, claiming to be unable to visualize e.g. triangles in the abstract, and so claiming to have no general idea of them. — The Great Whatever

Step 1 in avoiding philosophical mistakes:

Resist the urge to generalize from yourself to all others.

I wonder if men are worse visualizers than women, or tend to have more p-zombie tendencies. It wouldn't surprise me if women generally had a greater depth or subtlety of feeling than men. — The Great Whatever

Men tend to be more autistic, but Grandin is an autstic woman. From her writings, she seems to have trouble understanding other people's feelings. The nuance of social situations have been difficult for her.

Men also seem to identify less with their bodies than women (experience a greater degree of dissociation). I wonder if this motivated philosophers in the past to think of the soul or mind independent of the body.

I tend to suspect that philosophy is heavily influenced by human biology. Notice how often visual language is used. Wasn't the notion of matching up propositions with pictures a primary motivation of the Tracticus?

I have no language-based thoughts at all. My thoughts are in pictures, like videotapes in my mind. When I recall something from my memory, I see only pictures. I used to think that everybody thought this way until I started talking to people on how they thought. I learned that there is a whole continuum of thinking styles, from totally visual thinkers like me, to the totally verbal thinkers. Artists, engineers, and good animal trainers are often highly visual thinkers, and accountants, bankers, and people who trade in the futures market tend to be highly verbal thinkers with few pictures in their minds.

<snip>

Access your memory on church steeples. Most people will see a picture in their mind of a generic "generalized" steeple. I only see specific steeples; there is no generalized one. Images of steeples flash through my mind like clicking quickly through a series of slides or pictures on a computer screen. On the other hand, highly verbal thinkers may "see" the words "church steeple," or will "see" just a simple stick-figure steeple.

http://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html — Temple Grandin

I find that fascinating, because I'm a poor visualizer like Michael. My guess is that if Dennett was like Grandin, his philosophy would go in a different direction. But then again, he probably wouldn't be a philosopher.

ndeed the machinery of the world seem to have little room for them. — The Great Whatever

Maybe that's because the machinery of the world is understood as an abstraction. So, materialism has a mind/body problem, because the mind was taken out of it in order to get at the objective properties.

If all you're saying is that there are great variations in phenomenological experience, I do think that's an interesting scientific fact, but I don't know how it matters to this philosophical question any more than the well accepted fact that there are great variations in how well different people's perceptions work as well as their intellect in deciphering the meaning of their experiences. — Hanover

It may guide different philosophers intuitions about the mind. As I stated in an earlier post, I've read that some philosophers were skeptical that people could do visual rotations in their head. This is probably because those philosophers were poor visualizers, not because nobody is capable of doing so.

And for those philosophers like Dennett, who deny that there is any experience whatsoever in the head, it's all external (there is no Cartesian Theatre), one has to wonder whether they have aphantasia.

I once read an article by a guy who claimed dreaming was a purely linguistic phenomenon – that there was nothing to dreaming but reporting that one dreamt the next morning. Pretty retarded. — The Great Whatever

That's an example of doing bad philosophy.

The guy in the article says he doesn't dream, but self-reports of dreaming frequency are well-known to be unreliable. — The Great Whatever

Dennett in his early career defended the notion that dreams are a coming-to-seem-to-remember upon awakening. That we don't actually experience dreams while asleep, but rather the false memories are creating during awakening.

That's prima facie absurd for most people who have decent recall of dreaming, particularly lucid and semi-awake dreaming. Also, the dream studies support dreaming as an experience while asleep. But it's interesting how far distinguished philosophers like Dennett will go out of their way to deny subjective experiences.

omeone responded and said this was a bad way of speaking, that it's just thinking about a song, you can't actually 'hear songs in your head' and that this was a philosopher's confusion etc. etc. But the first guy was like, no, you don't get it, people literally have a quasi-auditory experience of music. — The Great Whatever

I get songs stuck in my head as well. It's not a philosophical confusion either. I literally have a quasi-auditory experience. Anyone who says otherwise is simply wrong, although maybe they don't have such experiences. Most people do, I suspect. Which is why the phrase is popular.

Do aphantasiacs dream? I thought everyone dreamed with the exception of a rare genetic condition that prevents sleep (which leads to death eventually).

What about inner dialog? I have an inner dialog going throughout the day. It's hard for me to imagine other people not hearing their own thoughts, outside of meditation. Aphantasics don't hear their thoughts? Do they have memories? Can they tell themselves a story?

Makes me wonder if Daniel Dennett has aphantasia. I recall reading where someone was talking about how certain philosophers were skeptical that human beings could actually visually rotate images in their mind, even though they claimed to be able to do so. There is now experimental support for visual rotation, but the author remarked that he realized some philosophers lacked the ability to visualize, and so they assumed everyone else was the same.

Also reminds me of Temple Grandin, who is the opposite of aphantasia. She's a visual thinker, and language is a secondary means of understanding that has to be translated from imagery. She compared her mind to a holodeck. But she had great difficulty understanding certain philosophical writings. They were too abstract.

I'm a poor visualizer, but I do visualize. Would love to know what it's like to have the equivalent of a holodeck in my mind. Would really help with certain skills.

You can't get time in the abstract, you have to look to your experience. And if you actually do that (instead of mining your experience to support a thesis, examining it through a premeditated lens) its all there, very simple. The past is past, the present is present, the future is future. It's not mystical - its common sense. — csalisbury

The problem here is that GR would seem to support some form of eternalism. Our common sense has often been wrong about the world, particularly when it comes to physics. But maybe there is a way of interpreting relativistic time frames that doesn't support block theory of time?

Do any of the options (including the 'growing block') make any difference to how we act? They seem to me like unsolvable word games. — mcdoodle

It's a question about the nature of time, and one that interests scientists as well as philosophers. I don't see it as just a word game. It's not like the liar paradox. Instead, time is fundamental to the world we experience, whatever time is exactly.

On this view, there can be no fact about what would have happened to you (singular) if you had opened the Schrodinger's Cat box at an earlier time. — Andrew M

That and the cat would know whether it was dead or alive. Never knew why a cat was different from a person in this scenario, as if there's something special about human observers that cat observers lack.

I know Schrodinger's point was that it was ridiculous to think the cat would be in a superposed state of alive and dead before we look, but a lot of people have taken it to mean the opposite.

Suppose I was speaking to a crowd of people and I said, "You have a red shirt." That statement lacks a truth value unless I'm addressing a specific person. — Andrew M

Does it, though? What if ten people in the crowd had a red shirt? Does the statement fail to refer to them?

I've certainly listened to speakers use a general you to address some people in the crowd.

Maybe the problem is expecting that ordinary language propositions necessarily rely on bivalence. In the case of QM, the truth value can depend on which branch, if one adopts MWI.

suppose a consequence of my view is that the world must remain fundamentally "mysterious" or "miraculous" in the sense that it cannot be explained as a whole. — Ignignot

That was Wittgenstein's position. The issue has come up in materialist vs. idealist arguments, where the idealist can just say the materialist is moving brute from experience to the material, which still leaves the material world unexplained.

I think you take explanation as far as you can, and then what's left is mysterious, for now. Maybe it will be explained one day, and maybe not.

Actually, I was trying to say (perhaps ineloquently) that something is indeed fundamentally "brute." These are the "prime" necessary connections. They are merely descriptive. "That's just the way things are." — Ignignot

That might be the case. My concern with bruteness is that it can be placed anywhere. Maybe experience itself is brute, as a few posters on here have argued in the past. Not my position, but it did help end the discussion in their favor, because where do you go after that?

Or if this necessity is explained by other more general necessities ("laws"), then we still always have some irreducible or "prime" necessities that just are what they are for no reason at all. — Ignignot

Maybe. I don't know whether it's possible to arrive at a self-explanatory theory for whatever is most fundamental. If not, then something is fundamentally brute.

but Kant showed that even 'bare experience' is dependent on the categories of understanding, the intuitions, and the other constituents of reason, without which there can be no experience. — Wayfarer

But if we want to know why this the case, then we're faced with:

1. There is no cause for our reason.

2. Mind is the causative power.

3. Reality is causal, and the mind reflects this. To put it in modern terms, the mind evolved to expect causal explanations, because the world is causal, and creatures who understand that are more fit.

Can there be a modal correspondence theory of truth?

This is why it is necessary to understand why Kant said that Hume had 'awoken him from his dogmatic slumbers', and what he did as a result. That was central to Kant's philosophical enterprise. So only considering what Hume had to say about it, is only considering the prologue to Kant's response. — Wayfarer

So Kant realized that Hume's argument was disastrous to reason, and something more needed to be said.