Comments

  • The Road to 2020 - American Elections
    The take-home is that half of eligible voters wanted to put their trust in a liar.Banno

    You mean of those who actually voted. It's not like Australia where there's mandatory voting and very high turnout. Probably 1/3 of eligible voters or more still didn't turn out this election, even with he higher turnout. The projection I see is 66%.

    So the question is did the 34% or so who likely didn't vote not care and were okay with the status quo, did they feel disenfranchised by the electoral college, did they feel the two parties don't represent their views, did they feel it was too difficult to vote, etc?
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    That’s a really good point. It’s not just arguing for a certain intuition.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    You see what seems to be colors making up images. That it seems there are colored images is the what it’s like for humans to see. Dennett may be right in quining the traditional property combination of qualia, but the seeming remains.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    That some seemings are readily apparent and others are pointed out just illustrates the dynamic nature of conscious awareness. The rabbit-duck can flip back and forth, which means it seems like there is a duck, and then it changes to a rabbit. It doesn’t mean there is no seeming.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    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?fdrake

    Dennett states in Quining Qualia that he grants the existence of consciousness, but then in Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness, he defends the argument that consciousness is an illusion as a good starting place for dissolving the hard problem in favor of explaining the magic trick.

    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.Quining Qulaia

    In other words, you can’t be a satisfied, successful illusionist until you have provided the details of how the brain manages to create the illusion of phenomenality, and that is a daunting task largely in the future.Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness

    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.

    Anything but phenomenal. And if there's no actual subjectivity, then there's no actual consciousness as the word is used in these debates. Which means we don't actually have color, sound, pain sensations.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    . In short, he equivocates. He does the same thing with free will.frank

    Yes he does. Because he wants to have his cake and eat it to. So he can't bite the bullet and just eliminate free will or consciousness outright, as he considers those to be concepts worth salvaging, as long as he can redefine them to remove any of the problematic implications.

    So he wants to say of course we're conscious of colors and sipping tea, but it's only in a functional, dispositional sense, not a phenomenological one. And he has endorsed illusionism elsewhere, calling consciousness a magic show in support of the position Keith Frankish has argued for.
  • How was Idealism Taken Seriously?
    I was looking through the points made by Berkeley and I fail to see how he arrives at my not having an idea of an object existing unconceived.Darkneos

    His argument is that all ideas of mind-independent objects smuggle in a perspective. You imagine a tree as if you were looking at the tree from some angle. What you can't do is imagine the tree from no perspective. He also rejects abstractions as real entities, so therefore abstract notions (like mathematical models) of material objects don't work either.

    Keep in mind the above is an attack on indirect realism, where material objects are inferred from mental ideas/representations. He first has to go through arguments disproving direct realism, because obviously if we're directly aware of material objects, then Berkley's idealism doesn't get off the ground.

    As for solipsism, it's a legitimate concern in my view, but I guess minds are given in Berkley's philosophy. Also, so is God, who is required to keep ideas persistent when we're not perceiving them.

    Berkley's idealism is just one form of idealism. There are others with their own strengths and weaknesses. And he wasn't the first. Idealism can be found in ancient philosophy. The motivating factor was the problem of perception, and later on, the varying ways humans categorize and make sense of the world.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    Checker_shadow_illusion.svg

    That we see the squares for A and B as different shades of gray is a visual illusion. Does this mean we only seem to see two shades of gray? That the illusion of color difference is itself an illusion?

    Or is the seeming to have a conscious experience the what it’s like for any conscious activity? There is a what it’s like to see red because it seems we see red. You can’t have a seeming to be conscious without there being something it’s like to be seeming.

    The seeming is consciousness.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    it seems that I’m enjoying Klee’s work, but I remind myself that it’s just a bunch of mindless robots playing a trick on me.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    I'm stuck in Mary's room. What frequency is it?frank

    A fact you can’t know without being told the dress seems to be red.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    Nice dress, isn't it?Olivier5

    It only seems that way.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    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 regardlessfdrake

    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. So then we’re left debating whether the relevant functions or neurons are themselves conscious, as in some sort of identity.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    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.fdrake

    Right, but the consciousness debate isn’t limited to perception, and the fact that other ways of stimulating the relevant brain circuits leads to conscious sensations locates those sensations in the brain. Also, I disagree that all non-perceptual states are less complex, It really depends on the brain and the experience. Some people are very good visualizers. Some can create music in their mind. Mental abilities and experiences range quite a bit. Take the right hallucinogenic and you can have very vivid color sensations.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    The thing with colour etc being 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.fdrake

    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.
  • What is Dennett’s point against Strawson?
    Yes, adequate, with respect to empirical knowledge. Would you agree with me, that human reason is often not satisfied with the merely adequate?Mww

    Certainly in the case of consciousness. There may be a few other exceptions. I was just stating the implication of Dennett's arguments.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    We never stand still long enough for any sort of input to become present to us in this revealed sort of way; we're already involved with whatever it is, expecting it, seeking it, avoiding it, using it, regretting it, whatever. We're really nothing at all like cameras, you know?Srap Tasmaner

    Well, one can meditate and focus on a particular sensation or object for a time.

    I think maybe we don't really either, not in the way typically imagined. I want to say what has to be avoided to start with is an image of experience that is at all static. Empiricists have this model of experience as chopped into a long string of instants -- your visual field is like this, then this, then this, and you have to make these inductive leaps to tie it all together into any kind of coherence. But there's nothing like this really going on, is there? We are, while awake, in constant multifaceted contact with our environment and processing an unending stream of data which we constantly project into the future and take action on. All of these point-like experiences we seem to construct retrospectively, I'm not at all sure anything quite like that is ever actually happening. Feeling the sun and the wind is bound up with all the rest of the process of living, testing, responding, projecting.Srap Tasmaner

    Sure, it's dynamic. Perhaps some of the traditional intuitions of qualia are flawed because of not taking this into account?
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    I'm not entirely in agreement with Dennett, because I'm not a physicalist, and for good reason. However, he has successfully rendered the conventional notion of Qualia false at best, and devoid of content at worst. He showed that it is an accounting malpractice.creativesoul

    Even if Dennett does so for the ineffable, intrinsic, direct, private definition of qualia, it still leaves sensations to be explained. And not just for perception, but all conscious mental activity, only some of which is made public to others through language or behavioral inferences.

    And that's why I think Dennett ultimately ends up espousing or implying some form of illusionism in other talks or papers he's written. It should be noted that He did use to defend skepticism about dreams, claiming that we only come-to-seem-to-remember upon awakening. Because dreams present a similar problem, perhaps an even more difficult one for physicalism, since dream content isn't based on perceiving an external world.

    But dream research since then has supported dreaming as an activity that happens while you sleep, not something invented as you wake up (or at least not always). And lucid dreaming is a thing.

    The consciousness debate seems to mostly revolve around perception for some reason, but consciousness isn't limited to that. If you can daydream while driving a car, what is going on in Dennett's account?
  • What is Dennett’s point against Strawson?
    I'm not asking if you agree with that answer (I'm not even sure I do) I'm asking why it isn't even addressing the question, as schopenhauer1 claims.Isaac

    Because I just don't see how one gets color, sound, taste out of number, shape, extension. It's that simple. Dennett is wanting to say the world is just explainable in terms of Locke's primary qualities. Which in modern language is function and structure. But the secondary qualities, or the sensations of consciousness, aren't derived from the primary ones.

    So we're left with explanations that explain the underlying mechanisms, as best we've figured out so far, but not the resulting sensations. The best people on Dennett's side can do is dismiss the senasations as an illusion, leaving nothing but the cognitive trick to be explained.

    The implication of Dennett's arguments is that we are p-zombies, fooled into thinking we have conscious experiences which can't be explained by the physical mechanisms, or at least, we haven't figured out how to do so. But it's all just a magic show. There's no real mystery, no cognitive closure, no dualism. Physicalism is adequate.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    It's no good re-telling us that we do indeed have intuitions that objects have sensory properties, that's where the whole inquiry begins, we move on from there to explore some of the problems with that intuition.Isaac

    There is a potential epistemic minefield in this approach. If we can't trust our sensations to be real, why trust that there is a material world at all? Empiricism is based on investigating phenomena, but those phenomena appear to us as having colors, making sounds, etc.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    There really does only seem to be a taste of tea, Dennet takes us through step by step how what we'd like to think is the taste of tea is not what it seems. I've added a bit of gloss from modern cognitive psychology, but, as I said right at the beginning, Dennet's argument is that our intuitions are mistaken, so it's pointless responding to that with reference to those same intuitions.Isaac

    There are our intuitions about our sensations, and then there are our sensations given to us in experience. I saw colored objects and tasted tea long before I knew anything about qualia. And I even noticed that my taste of certain foods or drink changed over time.

    Seeing a colored in world isn't an intuition. It just is there in your visual field. Same with tasting tea. Reflecting on the nature of those sensations is where intuitions start to come in to play.
  • What is Dennett’s point against Strawson?
    Consciousness is made up of matter and energy. Consciousness is not another form of existence separate from matter and energy. If someone claims this to be, they must provide evidence to counter the evidence that shows consciousness comes from the brain, which is made out of matter and energy.Philosophim

    Maybe so, but matter and energy are physical concepts created to explain a wide range of phenomena. It's possible that these concepts are lacking when it comes to consciousness, because they are abstracted categories based on careful investigation of what our senses tell us about the world.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    You still have
    But maybe that just is consciousness, not immediately, not straight from the senses, but the continual updating of your model of a world of objects. That sounds pretty close to what we'd expect a conscious organism to be doing, responding to change in a way that enables planning. Is there an alternative that doesn't require a Cartesian theater?Srap Tasmaner

    Except that you're just substituting "continual updating of your model of a world of objects" for the world of sensory objects and feels we experience. Somehow that updating of the model has to lead to colors, pains, etc. Computer simulations can continuously update their models and we don't take that as evidence for consciousness. There is nothing it's like to be a computer program, at least none we've created so far. That is to say, computer models don't have sensations. They don't see a colored in world, feel the coldness of the wind, smell the fragrance of flowers, feel the heaviness of a long workout in their joints.

    Something has to make the model feel. Breathe life into the algorithms, if you will.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    That makes sense. Somehow conscious experience arises from discrimination. That might be a clue. If it's possible to break down all the discriminations to some fundamental level which could possibly be shown to be produced by whatever neural activity or function it's performing.

    I don't know, just thinking about how one might try to approach explaining consciousness. Somehow you have to show how the act of discriminating becomes a conscious sensation.

    Then again, maybe it happens with the integration of the various discriminations into a unified experience that is the center of attention. It still seems like trying to marry two fundamentally different categories. One for objective observation and one for subjective experience. But maybe it can be done?
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    We don't. That's the easy solution.Isaac

    So you outright deny that we have conscious experiences. How does that work for you? You tell yourself it's only seems like there is a taste of tea when you sip?

    To be fair, I have a few times tried to believe this upon reading some well argued paper, but I always go back to the warm embrace of the hard problem. That seeming is bloody hard to dismiss.
  • What is Dennett’s point against Strawson?
    No, my point was that if I claim we do already have a science of consciousness, and as such we already do know what's conscious, you'll still claim we don't.Isaac

    Because there is no consensus in any related field for an explanation of consciousness. Of course there is much ink spilled on the topic with many different approaches, but Dennett's work is controversial and not accepted by many professional philosophers.

    That is 'how'. As I showed with my examples of other 'how' questions, that's exactly the sort of thing which counts as an answer to 'how'Isaac

    No it isn't. That's just an assertion that consciousness is somehow identical to certain functions. If we knew that to be true, then there would be no mystery as to what else is conscious. If it performed those functions, whether it was a bat nervous system, a simulation, a robot or a Chinese Brain, it would all be conscious, end of story.

    Even so, you're still just repeating the dismissal without specifying a reason. If "explain[ing] how my brain performs certain functions related to discriminating color" isn't an answer for you to "how there is a color sensation", then it seems entirely reasonable to ask you for an account of what's missing.Isaac

    Because it doesn't explain how it is that we're conscious. Why do functions result in an experience at all? They're just functions.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    To quite the contrary, I would call it a failed philosophical attempt at taking proper account of what conscious experience consists of and/or is existentially dependent upon. A failed attempt at setting out the pre-theoretical, basic, and/or fundamental elements of conscious experience.creativesoul

    Oh okay. I misunderstood. I agree that illusionism fails in this regard. And Dennett is sometimes hard to pin down, but I think he has outright supported illusionism at times, even though he says he doesn't deny consciousness. Because for him, consciousness is completely explainable in functional terms. It only seems like it's something more to us.

    But that seeming just won't go away so easily.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    The signals which chemosensory neurons send to cotices higher in the hierarchy. Nothing more. Beyond that you start to see the influence of a whole slew of non-chemosensory systems getting involved, feeding back to the chemosensory neurons, suppressing certain signals, re-iterating others. One if the many paths taken ends up (together with input from a hundred other unrelated paths) in the stimulation of the motor neurons responsible for forming the words "this tea tastes bitter". Where in all that is the 'taste' of the tea?Isaac

    Indeed, but yet we have an experience of tasting the tea. That's the hard problem.
  • What is Dennett’s point against Strawson?
    But this is circular. Maybe we have created consciousness in robots "no, they're just p-zombies", how do we know what they've got isn't consciousness?Isaac

    Isn't this admitting to the hard problem, or at least Block's harder problem? If we had a science of consciousness, we would would be able to know what was conscious.

    How could an understanding of the world have sensations? If this is your target then its not the 'hard' problem its the downright ridiculous problem.Isaac

    The hard problem is aimed at the ontological conclusions derived from our understanding of the world, which would be physicalism. It's part of the ongoing mind/body debate between materialists and dualists.

    I don't think so. If one is going to dismiss Dennet's hard work as missing the target, I think it's fair to ask for an account of what the target is.Isaac

    Dennett isn't a neuroscience, and his multiple drafts doesn't explain sensations. It just suggests how various activity in the brain becomes the center of attention.

    This just repeats the question. If, say, I explain the neuroscience of colour recognition, I'm trying to get at the sense in which that's not answering 'how?' for you. It's exactly answering 'how' for me.Isaac

    It doesn't tell me how there is a color sensation. Instead, it explains how my brain performs certain functions related to discriminating color. But as you admitted, we don't know if the same functions in a computer would also result in a color sensation.
  • What is Dennett’s point against Strawson?
    What would an explanation of this be like?Isaac

    How the brain creates experiences of colors, smells, feels, etc. So far, there are only correlations, but not an actual explanation. Such and such neural activity does some sort of discrimination of incoming electrical impulses from eyes and is integrated with other brain activity to create a conscious awareness of a red cup. But it would have to show how that happens, and not just claim it does (which would be a correlation with observed brain activity).

    It's kind of unfair to ask what the explanation would look like since nobody knows yet. Assuming neuroscience can provide one. But if it did, then the entry in the journal of philosophy could then go on to say how we could use this to understand bat sonar consciousness and create consciousness in robots.

    One reason to be skeptical of this is that neuroscience is like all science in that it's an abstraction from various first person experiences to arrive at an objective understanding of the world. But that objective understanding has no sensations of color, etc.
  • What is Dennett’s point against Strawson?
    Orthodox Christians do believe God is spirit, so their worldview is still dualistic.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    What is their nature? I don’t know, nor does anyone else, it would seem. What I do know is they are the result of certain animal nervous systems when perceiving, dreaming, etc. But they vary by species, and to some degree, by individual. Take three people in a room. One feels cold, another warm and the third just right. But the thermometer measures the same temperature. This sort of thing was noticed by ancient philosophers in Greece, India and China.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    Are you blind from birth? What is the point of this sort of questioning?
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    Combinations of red, green, blue visual experiences. Are you a color realist?
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    I don’t have conclusions in this debate. It remains a puzzle.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"


    Thinking for a wee bit ...

    Although the original is identical to the materials which make up the painting (when arranged in that particular fashion), the image itself can be reproduce in other media, such as the digital version you posted. So although we might be tempted to say that a red cup is identical to the process of perception of seeing a cup, we can also produce red cup experiences in dreams, imagination and hallucinations.

    So then it would seem sensations like images can be produced by different processes.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    I've thought through the consciousness debate more than any other philosophical subject, which includes reading and listening to debates.
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    Again, if you assume a distinction between objective and subjective statements, you shouldn't be surprised to find that you can't bridge the gap you created.Banno

    The distinction falls out of whatever language you wish to use, because our perceptions of the world and mental processes differ from the world.

    We end up with two different ways of talking about the same thing. The coin is an alloy of tin and copper; and it can be exchanged for a bag of lollies. That's not a mismatch.Banno

    But you agreed earlier in this thread that red isn't electromagnetic radiation of certain wavelength. Are you saying now the entire process is identical to having a red sensation?
  • Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
    Red is used in explanations. I handed you that cup because it is red.Banno

    That's not scientific. The red isn't the reflective surface, it's not the lighting, it's not the activated cones, it's not the electrical impulses going to my visual cortex, and it's not the neural activity.

    Unless you wish to defend either color realism or mind-brain identity.

    Introduce the problematic division of objective and subjective statements and of course you end up with an inability to bridge the great divide that is the hard problem. It's sitting in your assumptions.Banno

    You don't need to. Just use the terms of sensation and the terms of neurons, electromagnetic radiation and molecular surfaces and you'll see there's a mismatch. Ordinary language analysis doesn't help here.