On the contrary, it is what is so. — Banno

If that's as compelling an argument for it we're going to get, so much for that.

This is not the case. We can refer to the flower, and alternately, we can refer to the experience of the flower. — Banno

This has already been addressed twice.

That said, I have to correct myself. Just as I might refer to "the red flower" as a shorthand for "my experience of a red flower", I'm also apt to refer to the object itself as "the red flower" as a shorthand for "the (hypothesed) object that causes my experience of the red flower". Then, of course, all references to objects are really just references to mental models, to hypotheses about an us-independent reality that with overwhelming likelihood exists, but that we have no direct knowledge of. — Kenosha Kid

But this isn't the issue at hand. You were not critiquing me, I was critiquing Dennett by way of you:

Qualia add nothing helpful to the conversation:

What is gained by talk of the-qual-of-the-flower that is not found in talk of the red flower? — Banno

It is helpful to have a more precise language with which to distinguish objects from our experiences of them. My contention was that "qual" is a good, if putative, term that, until more facts are forthcoming, allow us to unambiguously discuss the latter without being confused for the former. I'm not seeing anything like support for the above here, just a lot of distraction. Perhaps we're misunderstanding one another, but iirc my reading of the above is consistent with your posts on this from years ago.

That strikes me as question-begging. No, you are conscious of the flower. It is not until you have studied philosophy that you might mistakenly come to think of yourself as conscious of a model of the flower. — Banno

That makes no sense. I am conscious of what I'm conscious of. Whether I'm mistaken about what it is is irrelevant to what I'm conscious of.

Again, the model is part of your being aware of the flower. — Banno

The model is not constructed consciously.

But consider this: when you pick the flower, it is the flower that has it's stem broken, not the model. — Banno

This sort of error is more likely to be made by someone who fails to accurately distinguish between a hypothesised object and their phenomenal experience than by someone who is more careful.

I experience the representation of the complete flower, of the breaking of it, and of the broken flower. An objective reality of the flower remains the best theory for this. Nonetheless, I have no direct, unmediated perception of the flower, only a model built from data. The flower is not interesting: the model, and my awareness of it, are interesting. For that, I need a language to talk about it, which you argue against having.

Seriously, do your research. I pose no more threat to others than I ever did. You could sit across the table from someone with active Covid for a nice 2 hour romantic dinner and your chances of catching Covid increases by a whopping 5%. Not a 5% chance of catching covid, just 5% greater than before. Factor in that 80% of the population won't even know that they had (or have) the virus and the end result barely registers on the attention scale. — Book273

Sounds like you do your own research. My partner had covid, really bad. I slept with her every night. Truth told, there was grown up stuff happening too in the early days when we thought it was just a cold. I was fine. So I guess by your logic, everyone is fine, right? That I can sleep with someone with covid and not get it is 100% proof that everyone who encounters someone with covid won't catch it, right?

Like I said, get yourself fired. You're a liability. I think some people just don't get probability theory and you're one of them, which is a problem when your job is to minimise the probability of people contracting a virus. You clearly don't understand how it spreads, in fact the logical conclusion of your reasoning is that covid doesn't exist at all, despite millions of people dying from it. Or was that fake news?

Crappy mask worn right. I am not allowed to wear the proper mask. I do in fact know my business, however, just because I know what is what does not mean that I am supplied with, or allowed to use, the proper PPE. Welcome to modern healthcare. — Book273

So your real qualm isn't with mandates but the quality of the PPE provided to you. It's odd, isn't it, that a slip-up like that can make you look like one of the irrational masses squealing about how consideration for the health and lives of others -- your business, I gather -- is a violation of your freedom to... cause the deaths and ill health of others, I suppose.

Maybe listen closely to what they are saying, and before assuming they are a nutcase, consider the implications if they are in fact being entirely accurate. Scary stuff. — Book273

Oh, she very helpfully posts a huge newsletter through my letter box, a full tabloid newspaper's worth. It's all paranoid conspiracy theories drawn from the bowels of Reddit and Fox News. Scary stuff indeed.

Then why not commit to direct perceptual access of vague objects? — sime

I don't know what you mean by "vague objects". I don't commit to, or even entertain, direct perception of objects because it conflicts with evidence and doesn't actually have any explanatory power, like God or any other daft concept that merely kicks the question down the road.

I put it to you that we can refer to two distinct things: the flower and the perception of the flower. — Banno

I think it's me putting that to you

Hence,it is not the case that we always refer to the experience fo the flower. — Banno

Never said otherwise, although in my description of the shorthand way we use language, I originally omitted the later clarified point:

Just as I might refer to "the red flower" as a shorthand for "my experience of a red flower", I'm also apt to refer to the object itself as "the red flower" as a shorthand for "the (hypothesed) object that causes my experience of the red flower". — Kenosha Kid

It describes the situation as if one were looking at a mental model of the flower; but that is not what is happening. The mental model is not something we observe, so much as part of our very act of observing. — Banno

I don't disagree about observing, but then I didn't speak about it. I am conscious of the representation. I am not conscious of building the representation. To that extent, then, the representation is presented to my consciousness, which is the humunculus you refer to.

I have been careful throughout to refer to this as a seeming, and the origins of this seeming are interesting, not fully understood, and therefore worth having a language for, meaning we need words for the experiences and not just their objective causes. Whether qualia will be a useful description in the end, I cannot say, but right now since I seem to have experiences and those experiences seem to have properties, qualia seem to be useful concepts.

But I agree it's perfectly reasonable to consider that there's no difference between having a model and experiencing it, if that's more what you meant, but the above is consistent with that too.

Then, of course, all references to objects are really just references to mental models, to hypotheses about an us-independent reality that with overwhelming likelihood exists, but that we have no direct knowledge of. — Kenosha Kid

If you want it broken down into simpler pieces, I have done that too:

Data comes in via the senses.
The (unconscious, system-oney) brain integrates, transforms, filters, and annotates that data to build a model.
Then either:
1. We experience (conscious, system-twoey) that model, that experience has properties, those properties are called qualia, or
2. Those models have properties, we experience those properties, experience of those properties are what we're calling qualia. — Kenosha Kid

There's no recursion here

Or join Hanover in failing to commit to the red flower's existing. — Banno

No, I commit to all of reality, I won't cherry-pick. What I don't commit to is the fantasy of direct knowledge of objects.

Currently I have a useless piece of crap mask on my face — Book273

Why not get a good one?

Does it protect me? No. Does it protect my patients? No. — Book273

Are you wearing it wrong, or is it just the crapness of the mask? A good mask, worn correctly, will reduce your aerosol spray into, and from, your environment, which is the principle mode of transmission. What worries me is that you are supposed to take care of patients and don't know this.

There's a nutcase nurse living opposite us who also bangs on like this. Personally, I think you *should* stick to your guns, go mask-free, get fired, and thus reduce the liability you pose to others.

I wish I could wear a Guy Forks mask — Book273

It's Guy Fawkes. Forks are for eating food with.

Yep, he was. — Book273

So you're advocating mask-wearing? Cool.

I'm arguing that 'true' just means the same as 'justified belief' and so adds nothing. — Isaac

Long time! I think "justified" just means "with good reason", not "retrospectively justified". If my partner says my keys are on the coffee table and the kids confirm it, that justifies my belief that the keys are indeed on the coffee table, whether or not they are all mistaken.

It's supposed to distinguish from beliefs that are reached erroneously, but may also be true.

Disturbingly similar to V for Vendetta...Guy forks mask anyone? — Book273

Getting mixed messages... Wasn't the mask-wearer the hero fighting for freedom?

Introduction. I hope I didn’t mistranslated. — Mww

:up:

So we arrive at a thesis for qualia, in that for you, they provide properties of experiences. — Mww

They _are_ properties of experience, by definition, aren't they? Although I sometimes see people talk about them as if they are _objects_ of experience e.h. "the red flower" is the qualia, not it's redness or flower-shape. I believe this was also the ambiguity with sense-data.

They way I see it, the seeming of qualia has two possible origins, both of which seem viable and therefore validate use of the term.

Data comes in via the senses.
The (unconscious, system-oney) brain integrates, transforms, filters, and annotates that data to build a model.
Then either:
1. We experience (conscious, system-twoey) that model, that experience has properties, those properties are called qualia, or
2. Those models have properties, we experience those properties, experience of those properties are what we're calling qualia.
Which I think amount to the same thing. Somehow or other I'm conscious of the redness of the red flower, whether because the model has a property that is experienced as redness, or because the experience has the property of redness.

I suppose this to mean making them the same. Not an issue for me, insofar as I hold them to be distinct necessarily, therefore the collapsing one to or into the other, is unintelligible. — Mww

Yes, especially as it removes the language to make things intelligible.

Oh, of course, alternative medicine peddlars and those who publish in reputable scientific journals like The Journal of Near Death Experiences are exempt, but then they'd never pitch such quackery as neural correlates of consciousness in the first place.

No, the ones you have to watch out for are those who build models, draw hypotheses, and test those hypotheses in repeatable ways in order to build consenses. Not real scientists, really, as demonstrated by their shifty reliance on evidence.

But if you collapse the distinction between perception and object, doesn't that mean the world is the content of perception? — frank

Sure, that would be a generalisation, from how we talk about things to how we think about or model things. I was just talking about Banno's language, not his beliefs.

I realize those on the forum who advocate this kind of collapse don't mean to take this step, but how would one avoid it? — frank

I haven't realised that. That is, they don't seem to be trying to avoid that absurd conclusion to me. But you've been here longer than I have, so you'd know I suppose.

I didn’t get that from the statement. I take KK to be very far from an idealist, so I guess that’s why I didn’t make that connection. — Mww

I wasn't generalising, I just meant collapsing the distinction between objects and our experiences of them in language doesn't seem helpful for talking specifically about experience.

Rational thinking --even simple logic-- can never allow anyone to accept that consciousness is in the brain. — Alkis Piskas

And if any scientist should make a compelling argument that consciousness resides in the brain, she should be put under house arrest in the name of rational thinking!

Ya know.....if reference to an object is the experience, or the possible experience, then qualia is itself a prepending, which was the ground of the negation argument from the beginning. — Mww

If... Is this you introducing the idea, or a mistranslation of mine? Reference to the object is not experience of the object, but a shorthand for reference to the experience of the object. When I refer to the red flower, I am generally referring to my experience of it. "It is red" is a clue that I'm referring to experience, not the purported object itself, since "red" is not a property of the flower, except again as shorthand for its emission spectrum in natural or everyday environments.

That said, I have to correct myself. Just as I might refer to "the red flower" as a shorthand for "my experience of a red flower", I'm also apt to refer to the object itself as "the red flower" as a shorthand for "the (hypothesed) object that causes my experience of the red flower". Then, of course, all references to objects are really just references to mental models, to hypotheses about an us-independent reality that with overwhelming likelihood exists, but that we have no direct knowledge of.

I'm interested in the bit between photons hitting my retina and me perceiving a red flower. Flowers are, to that extent, boring, but experiences of flowers are interesting and maddeningly complex. Properties of those experiences are therefore also interesting, and we have the word 'qualia' for them. Is this a good word? Does it bring with it relevant connotations of some value when discussing experiencing itself? Time will tell. But...

Would your acknowledgement indicate qualia are meant to replace representations, as a consequence of empirical knowledge? — Mww

... I don't really see it as a contest between likely inaccurate descriptions of consciousness by stroky beard types before the data is in and conclusive. Consciousness seems to involve representation, a model, along with pathological features and errors. Awareness of that representation is experience itself. If that experience has properties, and it seems to, then qualia and representations aren't mutually exclusive*. "The red flower" is such a model, unconsciously constructed based on all sorts of data and processes. My experience of it checks out, and has properties like 'red', and 'flower-shaped' as well as contextual properties. I don't know where these come from or why they seem, but it's useful to be able to talk about them.

*It also seems to me that philosophy has a problem tolerating useful words associated with outdated theories. "Sense data" being another example. Becoming apoplectic at its employment just means having to invent more crap terminology for data we receive via our senses, all because some stroky beard dipshit said incorrect things about it. Philosophers are weird.

I'd put it down to the fact that people are far less in awe of sacred cows these days. It's a good time for balloon poppers. Or was, for a while.

If option B is true, I'm tempted to say that consciousness would be more "noisy" and less organised than it currently is. — tom111

I'm not sure why. If you needed a biological machine for figuring out which information to integrate and which to overlook, a brain seems like a good shout.

But...

However, if option A is true, surely this suggests that consciousness can in some way influence the activity of the brain? The brain after all, would not regulate its own activity to account for some phenomenon that has absolutely no effect on it. — tom111

seems reasonable. The first few times you take a new journey in the car, it's a very conscious effort. Repetition reduces such demands. Eventually you find yourself taking a crucial turn without any memory of how you got there or into the correct lane for the turn. Some learning does seem to be learning from conscious experience and decision-making.

Consciousness, particularly conscious decision-making, must have some utility for the brain for us to have evolved brains capable of it.

How we get from photons destroyed by retina and currents pumped along optic nerves to my experience is nowhere near fully known. Collapsing the distinction between a thing and my experience of it eliminates the language to ask interesting and relevant questions. We can commit to reality and still ask questions about how it works. — Kenosha Kid

What does the shorthand do, that the experience hasn’t already done? — Mww

Aside from saving me from prepending every reference to an object with "my experience of", acknowledging the shorthand allows me to ponder how we get from currents along optic nerves to experienced images. (Ditto for all senses.) You cannot do that if you limit yourself to talking about the referent of 'the red flower' only. The flower is well understood. My experience of it is not.

Really, I thought it was an incredibly simple idea.

Qualia is what a philosophical zombie doesn't have, any interior experience (likeness?) of existence. — Nils Loc

Qualia is defined as something that a thing that perhaps doesn't exist doesn't have? That's the opposite of simple. It's elusive, if anything.

Qualia add nothing helpful to the conversation:

What is gained by talk of the-qual-of-the-flower that is not found in talk of the red flower? — Banno

I like Dennet, and the consensus among the contributors here I'm most aligned to/admiring of seems to be against qualia, but I've never quite grasped the landing of the argument.

When I refer to the red flower, I am doing so as a shorthand for my experience of the red flower. Even in saying "red", I'm not speaking of the energy levels of molecules in the flower, nor the dominant frequency range of light emitted by the flower. I am explicitly referring to something that is caused by (commitment to reality) but not found in the object.

How we get from photons destroyed by retina and currents pumped along optic nerves to my experience is nowhere near fully known. Collapsing the distinction between a thing and my experience of it eliminates the language to ask interesting and relevant questions. We can commit to reality and still ask questions about how it works.

And if we cannot get such any accurate imagination of reality, how can any technological progress made by humanity be explained? — Mersi

By becoming more accurate, even if not completely accurate. Technological progress is linked to our ability to make accurate predictions of what we observe, not accurate models to draw those predictions from per se. However, it seems reasonable to believe that a model that has a 100% success rate across millions of predictions is a more accurate depiction of reality than an immediately falsified model. I would wager that our models will asymptotically approach, without touching, what reality is as science progresses. More via the elimination of bad ideas (falsification) than the imagining of good ones (scientific revolutions).

Particles have distinct spaces in many-body quantum mechanics, and QC approximations like Hartree-Fock.

Now how would you relate this to the concepts of chemistry and physics, within which, things move relative to each other? We cannot use an artificial coordinate system representing one "space", because this would be a false representation. Now each thing has its own space, within which it moves and changes, and that space needs to be related to the various "spaces" of every other thing. So we are left with a very complex problem. — Metaphysician Undercover

What you're describing is quantum chemistry :)

I feel that cannibals have been marginalised here.

It seems most natural to me to think of space as infinite. And actually it seems to be infinite in opposite infinite ways. There is no end to how small something can shrink. And if I hop towards a limit, there are always infinite sub-steps. — Gregory

What you're describing here is a continuum, so I guess that's also your answer.

My take: space is personal. Not just relativistic (fixed by reference frame), but rather each thing that exists has its own personal space. Interactions and correlations are couplings between these spaces that allow us to map one space onto another, approximately at least. These mappings enable a statistical projection of all these things going on in all these spaces onto a single hypothetical space constructed by the mind (or computer). So more like an infinite net, I suppose.

You can find the transcripts online very easily. The course of events I described seems pretty accurate. Yours seem... well, invented tbh. I've countered the dishonesty, that's all I'm interested in doing. I'm not here to keep anyone company in their fantasy world.

Now you're not even being consistent with yourself, let alone testimony. I have noticed that obfuscation via verbiage is definitely your thing. I bailed early when your description of the first shooting appeared as fictional as the post I was originally responding too. No need to correct it as I'd already done that.

No point addressing this to you particularly, just for the record, but your timeline of events was a work of fiction.

First off, R was running away from the group chasing him, and stopped running to shoot one of them. So they chased him again. The person he shot was unarmed.

R ran into a crowd but word spread that he'd murdered someone, and he was chased by another unarmed man who struck him to the ground. R murdered that unarmed guy too.

The only armed person who confronted R was the paramedic trying to attend to his second victim, who correctly believed R to be an active shooter.

Your version of events isn't remotely in line with the facts.

The bit I didn't get was after the ellipses:

If we consider the electron 'not in space-time', then the Higgs field would also have to be 'not in space-time'. And if there are other electrons in the beam that it can repel, those other electrons would have to be 'not in space-time', along with the virtual photons they're exchanging to repel one another. End result being that everything is in this other realm, and our space-time starts looking rather empty (except for observations). — Kenosha Kid

This is totally different from what you said erlier "We count, but only because nature does" — Alkis Piskas

Our concepts of numbers, indeed our existence at all, is dependent on these laws being true, and to that extent derives from them. — Kenosha Kid

It was a short post, you could have read to the end. But yeah if that's too hard, the conversation is doomed.

Rittenhouse was running away danger and going to the police (in this specific instance a mob actively trying to stop him - someone shouting "you're gonna die!"). The other took out his gun and rushed in. — I like sushi

This isn't even remotely close to anyone's testimony.

The examples I gave before were conservation laws; conserving the total energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, colour charge, number of leptons, number of fermions, and so on. This is counting as in: "accounting for quantity". Our concepts of numbers, indeed our existence at all, is dependent on these laws being true, and to that extent derives from them.

Okay. Well, after some thought, I'm gonna give my answer to the question anyway because I like the subject

There are technical and biographical differences between Madonna and Fitzgerald that are obviously objectively true, but mostly dry. What those differences can exploit, however, is subjectively appraised.

I had more in mind composition (since I personally value this above technical musicianship: big Tom Waits fan, not into Celine Dion). The purpose of music is to generate or else reinforce subjective judgements (even if by way of making money) and the interesting questions to me are along the lines of: which features of the music are responsible for these judgements?

Because you can say, yes, this pre-chorus had used diminished 7ths as tritone substitutions going up the scale and minor 7ths going down, objectively, but "giving it a gliding, transitory feel that heightens the force of the chorus" is subjective, whether that be in a personal context or a cultural one (e.g. how the use of bosanova in that pre-chorus affects the listener). And for a songwriter, making technical choices about composition and arrangement is how they attempt to generate the desired subjective appraisals.

No one is writing for a computer. They may be trying to create a whole new genre, write outside of any genre, develop or subvert an existing genre, or use what's proven to work to make a buck, but everything is still hitting a target audience: a group of people who have similar subjective appraisals about certain technical choices, distinct from people outside that target audience who have different appraisals of the same choices.

In all of those cases you're surmising what might happen in the absence of there being an observer. — Wayfarer

Rather: what might count as an observer.

But at back of that, 'the observer' provides the framework within which any observation is made or conclusion is drawn. — Wayfarer

That seems to be going too far imo. There is no physical theory afaik in which results depend on conclusion, which sniffs of sneaking human importance for the running of the universe in through the back door. In collapse and branching interpretations, observation is the catalyst. In Wigner, nothing is, except personally.

Realism wants to say that what is being observed would exist regardless whether observed or not - and in one sense that is true. But it's not true in any ultimate sense. — Wayfarer

I don't think it's true that observations are independent of being observed. If there's one thing we can definitely conclude from QM, it's that observing things affects the observed thing, at least on the elementary scale. Traditional sciences are likely unaffected by this paradigm shift because they're generally dealing with statistical ensembles, even if we didn't used to think of them that way (the classical limit).

I like Wheeler. His one-electron universe was a big influence on Feynman's representation of antimatter being matter moving in the opposite direction in time, a big influence in turn on me (and the aforementioned thread), and his it-from-bit weighs heavily on your "Is information physical?" thread. I think all of his ideas are interesting, including the PAP, without necessarily being true. I find that he and others like him blur the line between ontology and epistemology: we are not just building up a history of the universe, but actually creating that history via the same process. Fascinating, but unjustifiable.

That doesn't obviously relate to what I wrote. What do you mean?

Twice, apparently! :joke: No worries dude.

Then there's the inevitable question of what counts as 'observation'. Can Schroedinger's cat actualise his death? Can a shrimp, or a bacterium? A computer with a webcam, or some other sufficiently complex non-living human? Why not a Higgs field? And then conversely is even observation actualising anything? (the recent Wigner's friend experiments, in which it appears that collapse is local to the observer, although the "observer" in the actual experiment is just a part of the experimental apparatus.)

If we use the standard definition, how could a collection of switches have a justified true belief about anything? How would that work? — RogueAI

The usage of the word was explained in the same post it was employed. If your question is: "Pretending you meant something else, what did you mean?", you can pretend I've answered it as you see fit.

Can a collection of electronic switches be said to know anything? Doesn't that seem absurd? — RogueAI

(Not really "knows", but is constrained thus.) — Kenosha Kid

Doesn't seem absurd to me.