“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
— James Baldwin

Baldwin said this in a different context but it resonates here. Imagine a teacher who doesn’t believe in independent minds, and then imagine the damage that this teacher can do to his students. You cannot educate independent minds unless you believe in independent minds.

0’s and 1’s are very different from what I see
— Olivier5

The difference you're alluding to here is contingent and not necessary. — TheMadFool

I doubt it. I couldn’t decipher the source code of a jpg file if my life depended on it. A cellphone couldn’t see anything or hear anything around it; it just records bits in a way that can help reconstruct images and sound.

And you think those taking an alternative position to you don't think they're being entirely logically consistent? So you think their position has logical contradictions...they obviously don't. What now? You point out the logical contradictions, they say "no, they're not logical contradictions because...". — Isaac

No, they would rather avoid having to face the fundamental contradiction in their thinking, because they are afraid to look like fools. You for instance, you keep avoiding the issue.

It's not only naive, but unbelievable arrogant to think you're the first one to suggest we use logical contradiction to analyse the positions. It's not as if either side have just written a three line syllogism that can be just put into a truth table or something. Even just parsing the two arguments into formal logic would be fiendishly difficult and prone to error, let alone the task of then comparing the two for logical errors — Isaac

I never said I was the first one. The point that eliminative materialism is self-contradictory has been made by countless people before me, starting with Descartes himself. He said: I think therefore I am, not I think and therefore I am an illusion... But materialists are like communists of old, you cannot talk them out of their ideology. It is a very strong belief, a form of religion, which provides believers with much comfort. Hence there will always be eliminative materialists, they will always be wrong, and most of them will never be able to realize it.

Thanks for the laugh! I have contemplated these things for about 40 years now. How long have you?

I'm sorry but to me, philosophy cannot ignore logic. I wish I could say whatever comes to mind, like many here do in automatic writing style, without caring for the logical consistency of what they say, but I can't.

Given that our knowledge and understanding of brains is in the form of conscious visual models, if our minds are illusions, then so is our understanding of brains. All the deniers do is undermine their own theories of how brains work. — Harry Hindu

Exactly.

Ok. Everyone hang their gloves up, fight's over. Someone thinks it's silly, so that's settled the matter to everyone's satisfaction... — Isaac

The main idea is not difficult to understand, whether or not you agree with it. — SophistiCat

It’s about the logical contradictions of materialism. Logic is important for some.

The Consciousness Deniers
Galen Strawson, March 13, 2018
One of the strangest things the Deniers say is that although it seems that there is conscious experience, there isn’t really any conscious experience: the seeming is, in fact, an illusion.

What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial—I’ll call it “the Denial”—every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.

The Denial began in the twentieth century and continues today in a few pockets of philosophy and psychology and, now, information technology. It had two main causes: the rise of the behaviorist approach in psychology, and the naturalistic approach in philosophy. These were good things in their way, but they spiraled out of control and gave birth to the Great Silliness. I want to consider these main causes first, and then say something rather gloomy about a third, deeper, darker cause. But before that, I need to comment on what is being denied—consciousness, conscious experience, experience for short. […]

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/

But then I think you need to also explain how images are "in" minds, too.
— Harry Hindu

Produced by minds, part of the makeup of minds, however you wish to phrase it. — Marchesk

Displayed to minds, I would say. There’s a mechanical, predictable aspect to perception. I cannot really chose what to see.

Exactly. If your cellphone was conscious, it would tell you things like: « Sorry, i don’t feel like taking pictures today; you are such a boring photographer »

What you'll see and hear will be exactly what the camera records through its lens and microphone — TheMadFool

When you think of it a bit more, you realize that what the camera and microphone record are just bits. 0/1. Those bits are recorded so that the images and sounds can be recreated for someone to experience them.

0’s and 1’s are very different from what I see.

Yeah, it's the difference between consciousness as a subject of investigation and consciousness as an adjunct to investigation. — Isaac

Those two are the same thing, there’s no distinction to make here. Until you understand that the problem involves reflexivity, you won’t be able to make any sense.

I’ve always been a brilliant student, a bit too gifted for his own good. You strike me as a closed mind, a bureaucrat of philosophy. You could try and follow your own logic and intuition rather than the authority and habit of others. It’s not that scary you know?

to say that consciousness is an illusion is essentially to saw off the branch on which you're sitting. For an illusion presupposes a conscious mind that is being deceived by the illusion. — Alvin Capello

Exactly. I don’t understand how supposedly cogent and smart philosophers can keep making the same logical error again and again. Dennett must not be very smart.

I doubt it. It would take an extraordinary reversal of mindset from the Brits to even ask to go back in the EU. They would need to adore what they burnt, burn what they adored, etc. Not gona happen. Also, the EU is unlikely to let them in a second time. Too much trouble.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." Ludwig Wittgenstein, — Antony Nickles

« If Wittgenstein could roar, nobody could understand him. »
— A lion

Ohhhh I see. All this feigned ignorance of seeing colours, tasting tea and feeling pain is done in the service of maintaining physicalism. Admitting the obvious might upset the physicalism gods. — Luke

Yes. The whole purpose is to behave and speak as if they were machines, so as to convince themselves that they are machines. I suppose it makes life easier to handle, when you pretend to be dead inside?

There are artists who worked with a very clear intellectual awareness of what they were doing, such as Henry James, who wrote an explanatory preface for each of his novel. Sometimes the preface was even better than the book. Others would not even be able to explain how they did the book, because their job is not to explain, but to do. — Rafaella Leon

Good post. Yet, sometimes the explanatory note ruins the novel, in that it restricts its meaning(s) to one single facet or dimension. A work of art functions at many different levels. Whatever you can say about it is a always a simplification.

Going back to why we joined in the 70's, it was a move to save our economy, as the sick man of Europe, we were in a desperate state and membership provided a well needed lifeline. — Punshhh

Didn’t know that. It’s a pretty good reason to join a trading block. And not to leave it I guess.

Ak ok. Perfide Albion as we call it. :-))

The Swiss have the same problem. Still struggling to think we ever did anything wrong. — unenlightened

You’re Swiss?

I have to agree, although there is a sizeable proportion of the UK population who does value the EU. — Punshhh

I know, but they are almost invisible in the media. I am unaware of any radically pro-European UK newspaper for instance.

Are you familiar with surrealism? — frank

A little. Surrealist writing is part of the effort to shake our world view, to rediscover reality with new eyes. To allow a bit of folly back into our positivist, atomistic modern world. It was — in France at least — a response to the positivism of Auguste Comte (a naïve, quasi-mythical materialist belief in science and technology as saviors, as inherently good, and as the one and only way to truth, what is now called scientism). The first world war had shown that science and technology could be used to pulverize people by the thousand. I believe that somehow, the surrealists knew that Europe — with its hubris, its power-drunkness, its misplaced trust in cold, heartless rationality, its ever-growing technology, its ancestral hatreds revived by modern nationalistic zeal — that this continent was heading to a moral catastrophe. It was vital to err out of the beaten nationalistic and scientific tracks, urgent to find new ways to write, to paint and to think...

Didn’t work, unfortunately. The catastrophe still happened.

So what is the camera?
— creativesoul

Your eye is the camera and it is projecting footage on the screen which you watch. This “footage” is Qualia. — khaled

Good metaphor. Just want to say that we have two cameras (eyes), not just one, and therefore that we see actually 2 different footages all the time. So every time we see a red cup, we actually see two distinct images of the same cup. The difference between the 2 images tells us how far the red cup is from our eyes.

At least this is true for those of us who are qualiaphiles. I don’t know how the qualiaphobes can account for the fact that we see two cups where there’s only one cup.

Surrealist writing is a bit different than making a conceptual artist statements. It is not meant to explain anything. On the OP, Carrington said:

There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.
— Leonora Carrington

I agree, intuition and introspection (and imagination) are very important for the sciences and philosophy (and of course for the arts), but in the former domains they are always subject to empirical and analytic scrutiny, modeling and testing. — Janus

Indeed, and intuition is very handy to design crafty experiments. Also to know what you are looking for in those experiments. Scientist without intuitions are just number crunchers.

I find no need for qualia though, whereas you seem to want to preserve it. So, something is different. — creativesoul

What’s different is that I am using concepts like tools, opportunistically. I see them as sets, defined by the user. « Qualia » is just the set of qualitatively different tastes, smells, colors, timbres, etc. that help us perceive, represent and memorize the world. I see this concept as unproblematic, or not more problematic than others.

Generally, I recognize my own take, yes.

I see no difference with my way of using this word.

I don't understand your motivation in wanting to say that Morse code and the genetic code are equivalent. — Daemon

It’s because I don’t see the origin of the two codes as fundamentally different, just because consciousness was involved in one and not the other. To me it makes no significant difference to what they do, which is to code for something else.

"Engineered"? Murdoch simply sells papers by giving readers what they want, which is not challenging their ill-formed views and promoting fear of the unknown, but reinforcing them to promote outrage against the 'known' foreigners - simplistic stereotypes though they are. — Tim3003

Reenforced at least, if not engineered. Manipulated. Lied to. Flattered and fooled. Day after day, for years.

Another ‘crime’ of the UK, in my view, the original sin happened in the seventies: the UK joined a project it did not believe in. It joined the European project not to support it genuinely and positively, but to avoid being left out. Their heart was not in it. Hence they never invested much cultural and political capital in it.

Sure, but where did M. Morse’s intent comes from, if not some chemistry in his body? That is the hard problem, right? We postulate that chemistry produced or underwrote in Morse’s brain/mind the intent of designing the Morse code. But when chemistry is hypothesized to produce the genetic code, suddenly chemistry is not good enough to produce or underwrite an ‘actual’ code. Are you guys saying that brain chemistry is ‘magic’, or unlike chemistry in other places?

Please do explain.

Do you think Morse code emerged naturally? Can you see the difference between the way Morse code emerged and the way the genetic code emerged? — Daemon

I certainly don’t think gods and fairies were involved in the creation of the Morse code. Some guy called Morse must have invented it.

But how do you think he invented it, if not through some chemistry-based mechanism in his brain? Why should the Morse code, that must have emerged from some chemical process in the brain of some M. Morse, be seen as a truer code than the genetic code, which supposedly emerged from some chemical process in some primordial soup?

I believe the genetic code emerged naturally, just like I believe other codes emerged naturally, including human language. The natural emergence of a code doesn’t make it less of a code, in my view.

No idea.

I’m talking of the genetic code, not of some specific ability of a specific bacteria. You are saying that it’s not a real code because it has not been designed by someone, it just emerged haphazardly. I’m saying that we don’t know this origin of the genetic code for a fact. Abiogenesis is an hypothesis. So the most one can say is: assuming abiogenesis, then the genetic code was not designed by someone but emerged spontaneously from some physico-chemical process.

Try again. The infinite has absolutely nothing to do with whether something can or cannot be inside itself.

The genetic code is not "actual coding", coding here is again a metaphor, the whole amazing thing happens by what you call "mere chemistry". "Actual coding" takes place in the way you describe for the colour coding of a map, it's an activity which requires the involvement of conscious agents with the cognitive capacity to make use of symbols. — Daemon

So if the genetic code was written by God (or some alien race), then it is actual coding, but if it is the result of random variations, then it is not actual coding. By this reasoning, you cannot know if the genetic code is an ‘actual code’ or not, because you don’t know who wrote it.

To me, only the result counts. The origin doesn’t matter. If it behaves as a code, quacks as a code, and looks like a code, then it’s a code.

Intuitively, a thing cannot be inside itself. It is itself, not inside itself.

It is absurd to say that there is no set of all sets. — Philosopher19

Rather, it is fundamental, and perfectly intuitive.