Not just that, pain determines language use. Pain is one of the things that show what words like "good" and "bad" mean. — Daemon

There's an entire ethical system built around that.

the language itself is no longer connected to anything aside from itself and it's user. — creativesoul

That part. Just being a bit snide.

When you dream of flying, is it your body or a mental image of your body? The dreaming scenario shows it’s possible for your body to present an image of the body to itself. But more specifically, the nervous system.

Sounds like an argument for private language!

It jumps to the next parallel universe where you survive. P-zombies (deniers of qualia) don't get to take advantage. They stay and rot in their original universe.

Our use of language. — Isaac

That's absurd. Does this mean birds don't see colors?

And why don't we have the equivalent language for the rest of the EM spectrum or sonar?

Is it the theory that is physical, or what the theory is about (what it points to) that is physical, or both? — Harry Hindu

I would say the theory is ideal, in that it's humans creating a map of the territory, while the territory itself might be understood as physical, assuming a physicalist ontology. That does allow for the possibility that the theory is missing something fundamental. A map is only as good as the map makers and their knowledge of the territory.

So .... the mind is a Matrix? We need to take the red pill of philosophy to get to the desert of the real? Then we can go back inside the mind and kick some ass?

All conscious experience of seeing red cups includes more than just red cups, ya know? — creativesoul

I should hope so. Red cups in the brain doesn't sound like a healthy condition.

Neither, and I said as much from the very beginning. Curious that, huh? — creativesoul

I don't recall the beginning. I think I jumped in sometime after about 18 pages. It is a bit curious.

Sure, but once one side begins psychologizing the other, turn about is fair play.

I don't personally believe in an afterlife, but I do think Chalmers, Nagel, McGinn, Block, etc. present more convincing arguments than Dennett, Churchland, Frankish, etc.

Indeed. — creativesoul

Wait, now I'm confused. Whose side are you on? Do you just not like the term qualia?

Me too! I imagine there must be some emotional attachment to the term because it is thought to support some form of idealism. I think perhaps some people feel disappointed with materialism, because they think it challenges their hopes for a life beyond this one. — Janus

Alternatively, materialism fails to properly account for conscious experience. One might turn the psychologizing around and say that materialists have a dogmatic commitment to dismissing any arguments challenging their metaphysical positions.

There are variations in our biological machinery. — creativesoul

Of course. That variation somehow produces the color difference.

Gotta love it when folk ask someone to compare something that is nowhere to be seen to a color chart. — creativesoul

Public versus private colored?

But thing is that we don't always see the same colors.

What do you think about the three kinds of conscious experience I set out recently? — creativesoul

You'll have to refresh my memory. But does it matter for whether qualia is a useful concept? I take it you think the three kinds show that it is not useful.

Yeah, its weird how everyone always picks out the red ones. I'm fairly certain that that's because those frequencies appear exactly like those frequencies each and every time someone is picking out red cups... — creativesoul

You're certain that everyone will pick out the same shade of red?



Is the apple candy or rose colored?

But they are visual conscious experiences containing a red cup image.

When someone refuses to agree that all conscious experience of seeing red cups includes red cups, there's not much more that can be said is there? — creativesoul

Illusions, hallucinations and red not being a property of the cup itself leaves some room for saying otherwhise.

Proponents will insist that consciousness is not a thing, and that it thus cannot be subjected to empirical investigation; but this attitude assumes its conclusion. — Janus

Isn't that the case for any foundational premise? If we instead begin with the premise that we have direct access to material objects, then idealism and skepticism are boh assumed to be false.

What would it mean to say that aspects of experience are illusory? Just that they are not what we think they are, no? Are we liable to think of them as substantive? — Janus

That is the question. It seems most of us agree there are conscious experiences which include colors, sounds, pains, etc. But what does that amount to? We can reject qualia talk, but we're still left with the conscious sensations, which are not easily accounted for by some objective account.

If everything is just a symbol, what are they symbols for? — Banno

The mirror stage in a capitalistic society?

Idealism. — Banno

The self as a bundle of mirrored symbols?

Red, like pain and bitter, is experienced. You can't communicate that to someone who has never had that experience. At best you can tell them there are such experiences, but they won't know what it's like until they experience it themselves.

Unobservables aren't experienced. But they can be described. That's why we don't have words for sonar sensations, but we do for sonar.

here are names and descriptions for and/or of unobservables. — creativesoul

Those unobservables aren't red, nor do they communicate redness.

Personally I would rather obliterate any and all philosophical notions that lead to widespread confusion and false belief given the sheer power that belief wields in this shared world of ours. — creativesoul

If only you could get everyone else to agree with you.

Part of the Cartesian error is to categorize unlike things together based on superficial similarities instead of making natural and functional distinctions. So visualizing, dreaming, imagining, hallucinating, etc., are considered by the Cartesian to be a kind of seeing and perception, when they are not. — Andrew M

But they are kinds of conscious experiences. And the thing about them is you can't just dismiss dreams, hallucinations, etc. as properties in relation to the objects being perceived, since there are no objects, and thus no such relations. But there are still experiences.

I dream of a red apple, and that red apple is a visual experience.

Ok, I’l bite... And the conclusion is? — Olivier5

There's no knowledge problem. Thing is, the person (or robot) has to put themselves into the right state in order to gain that knowledge, which means that if they can't, they won't know what it's like. So I don't think Dennett's counter thought experiment does the trick.

reply="Olivier5;475231"] Well, he uses the robot version of Mary to counter the knowledge argument because Robo-Mary can learn how to modify their code or circuits to put themselves into the state of seeing red directly. Which presumably human Mary could do with brain surgery or a transcranial magnet.

However, this won't work with bat sonar. So Mary still doesn't know what it's like to be a bat. But it does get at the issue which is propositional knowledge cannot communicate a kind of experience a person has never had.

[ That's why Dennett is less sexist. He uses a robotic female instead.

I cannot read your mind and you cannot read mine. — Olivier5

Hasn't stopped some scientists from publishing papers about the political and moral persuasions of people linked to various brain scans. I'm guessing those are not much better than lie detectors.

A bat brain in a vat, I like. Cat in a box is a whole different other can of quantum worms. Why can't nuns be color scientists? (I suppose a female would never have come up with such a biased thought experiment on account of biological reality).

Have your read Dennett's paper about Robo-Mary?

A robot, a dead man and a blindsighted nun are lying next to you on a sunny beach. Describe the different effects of the sunlight on each of them. Do not write on both sides of the paper at once. Your time starts...now. — Daemon

Add a man day dreaming and another one meditating. Since there is apparently no such thing as inner phenomena, no cartesian theater, it should be easy to figure out who is experiencing what. It's all public, right? All out there in the world to empirically verify.

I think I shall start investing in lie detector tests and brain scans.

.as Davidson said

In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. — Banno

Like unmediated touch with the molecular motion or infrared light when we feel temperature, eh? The motion of molecules and the photons in the infrared range are given to us directly in experience when we feel warm or cold. That's how that works?

Every now and then, as with the bent-stick-in-water example, things aren't always as they seem. So that becomes a point of difference that can be investigated further. — Andrew M

Or like when someone hears voices and sees things the rest of us don't.

So how does this model deal with disagreements about what is perceived? Via norms that function much like the standard meter length bar that used to be held in Paris. If you want to check whether the apple is red, find a normally-sighted person and ask them. — Andrew M

Like that blue/gold dress?

There is currently no consensus on why the dress elicits such discordant colour perceptions among viewers[, 31] though these have been confirmed and characterized in controlled experiments (described below). No synthetic stimuli have been constructed that are able to replicate the effect as clearly as the original image.

Neuroscientists Bevil Conway and Jay Neitz believe that the differences in opinions are a result of how the human brain perceives colour, and chromatic adaptation. Conway believes that it has a connection to how the brain processes the various hues of a daylight sky: "Your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis... people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black."[32][33] Neitz said:

Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance... but I've studied individual differences in colour vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I've ever seen.[32] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#Scientific_explanations

Now Marchesk offered this as a reply to my 'the meaning of "red" cannot be the experience it points to'. — Banno

Well, this was meant to cover cases where people do not have the exact same experience, but they can still communicate about the same object.

But let’s say we never evolved eyes. In that case, red would have no meaning, even when we discovered light and that some creatures navigated by sight. It would be colorless like the rest of the EM spectrum to us.

Similarly, sonar or detecting magnetic fields might have some rich experience we have no words for, because we lack those sensory modalities.

Visual perception of red apples does not guarantee conscious experience of red apples — creativesoul

Or at least the process all the way up to focus/attention, assuming normal neurological functioning.

Correlated at least.

Correct. If we wanted to design a conscious robot, we wouldn’t know how to do it.