It's hard to see where he's committing a fallacy. — Sam26

You would need to posit a programmer which is no part of Chalmer's ideas..

Brain activity that triggers the vocalization of the expression "I am conscious." There's nothing special about those words. "I am conscious" is no more an indicator of consciousness than "one plus one equals two." They're just sounds that can result from mechanical operations. — Michael

This is exactly why a physicalist like Dennett, who thinks the idea of Zombies is incoherent, says that if they were possible, then we would all be zombies. Why would a zombie say it is conscious if it didn't think it was conscious? (Why would it say anything at all if it didn't think anything, for that matter?).

If the zombie can think it is conscious (which itself is an act of consciousness), and this thinking is the result of brain activity, then what reason could we have to think consciousnesses would not also be a result of brain activity?

Bear in mind that I said "consciously experienced"; I already allowed that there is a sense in which we could say that reflected electromagnetic radiation is (pre-consciously) experienced by the body. giving rise to the (possibly) conscious experience of coloured things.

Exactly. The "meaning" here would be the "thing" that you try to put in first place. — Heiko

Again I don't know what you want to say here.

But that is the same as saying when looking on a piece of paper (form) with a text written on it (content), the content was not experienced. It doesn't matter if you are able or unable to translate the text as we are not dealing with it's meaning. — Heiko

I don't see how what I said equates to that at all.

In any case in your example what distinction are you making between content and meaning? If I'm reading text in an unfamiliar language I would surmise that there is a content or meaning there, but I don't know what it is. How then could I be said to have experienced it?

Okay, another try: You take the synthesis of form and content and say the content was not experienced, as if we were talking cause-and-effect. But that is not the relation between form and content. — Heiko

All I was saying was that wavelengths of electromagnetic energy are not consciously experienced; meaning that we don't see wavelengths, we see coloured things. To put it another way, prior to scientific investigations people had no idea that colour was the result of different electromagnetic.wavelengths.

\

You were - in consequence - saying that, when I play guitar, that I am not hearing my play. That is what I deemed objectionable. The form of hearing what I play has the activity of my fingers, the vibration of the strings and the sound-waves as content. — Heiko

I don't disagree with what you say there, but what I said doesn't bear on that at all, as far as I can tell.

Are first-person experiences a thing? I think they are. If they are, then you are admitting there is some thing in the universe that cannot be described by another observer. — RogueAI

I don't know what you mean by "thing" there. I would say experience is not a thing, although it involves things. To describe an experience you describe the things involved in that experience.

I think I understand what you are saying but I'm not seeing how it relates to what you originally were responding to, here:

According to our investigations there are electromagnetic wavelengths that give rise to seeing coloured things in suitably equipped percipients, but those wavelengths are not themselves consciously experienced, obviously. — Janus

Do first person experiences count as phenomena or are they experiences of phenomena?

Ah right, I can see how it might easily be read like that! The "first course, second course, main course" bit was just added as a flippant extending play on the words; "discourse, of course".

:up:

What about when a group of top international
chefs get together for some food tasting? — Joshs

(That is not to say there cannot be more complex culinary judgements that do involve some discourse, of course—first course, second course or main course :wink: ). — Janus

I think you may have missed the part in brackets (or maybe you replied before I added it since it was an edit).

David Chalmers: 'First-person experience is such that it cannot be fully described in third-person terms. Experience is inherently subjective, it has a quality of "something it is like to be...", and that quality is inherently irreducible to an objective description.'

Daniel Dennett: 'No, it isn't. A properly elaborated third-person description will leave nothing out. So there is no "hard problem" at all.' — Wayfarer

Is that an actual quote from Dennett: did he actually say that?

If he did say exactly that, then the obvious critique would be that a third person account is not a first person account; so by definition a third person account cannot include a first person account without being something more or other than just a third person account. So, I cannot see how Dennett could be claiming that a third person account could include a first person account; I doubt he would claim something so obviously absurd, so I conclude that he must mean something else, and we would need to see the context to find out what that is.

where wishful thinking often dooms sensible ideas thoughts on the matter. — I like sushi

Yes, there does seem to be a lot of wishful thinking that serves to obfuscate in these matters. Some people just won't allow that we could be material beings; it seems such a thought is just not emotionally acceptable to them.

Dunno - if the experience is thought as some kind of "detector", does that notion make sense? Given: the vocabulary is obviously different. — Heiko

Are you suggesting that we experience the effects of things prior to cognitive experience. If so, that would not be conscious experience, though. Sorry, beyond that guess, I'm not sure what you're getting at; can you explain a little?

Then I am embarrassed for not making it clear I wasn’t talking about flavor. — Mww

That you like cauliflower now, but dislike it later, are each nonetheless aesthetic judgements. That you are fickle with respect to your feelings regarding cauliflower over time, does not carry over to the fickle-ness of the judgements regarding the stuff, insofar as each judgement arises simultaneously with, and necessarily representative of, the feeing. — Mww

OK, then I am not sure what you were trying say with the post I responded to, exemplified by what I've just quoted above. You seem to be claiming that liking or disliking the flavor (or texture, it doesn't matter) of a food is an aesthetic judgement rather than being merely a bodily reaction. In my view an aesthetic judgement always carries a discursive dimension, and I don't see a discursive dimension being involved in simply liking or disliking foods. (That is not to say there cannot be more complex culinary judgements that do involve some discourse, of course—first course, second course or main course :wink: ). But again, perhaps I have misunderstood you.

It seems there's no reason to suppose that packing more and more information-processing functions into a program would ever yield the sort of "subjective character" of experience that's said to generate the hard problem of consciousness. — Cabbage Farmer

Yes, and I think a plausible explanation of that is we have evolved over billions of years from single-celled organisms who have had to struggle against environmental forces and other organisms in order to survive; so things primordially matter to organisms and have come to matter to us in ever more complex ways, ways in which things could never matter to a computer; in fact nothing at all matters to a computer. It seems reasonable to think it is the mattering or significance of things that is at the heart of subjectivity.

What is "over and above" the qualities we find in things? Is there anything like that? All we can say about the world is going to be related to whatever happens to interact with our cognitive capacitates and sensations. — Manuel

I would say that what we think about those things we find is over and above them.

That's just the thing, Dennett is far from being clear on what he stance is. Searle, Strawson, Tallis, McGinn, Goff, Kastrup and many others take Dennett to be denying these things. — Manuel

What exactly do they take him to be denying? Perhaps their interpretations of Dennett's thoughts are based on assumptions he doesn't share; in which case they would be bound to misunderstand him.

Clearly Dennett is smart, speaks well, gives good examples. But he's leaving plenty of room for doubt when he says "there seems to be qualia".

I take him to be just saying that those quantiies are not what we might think they are due to our intuitive tendency to reify and create superfluous entities via language. — Janus


What is the colour experience red, aside from our experience of it? We can proceed to speak of wave-lengths, but that's not colour experience. — Manuel

I think he is right to acknowledge that there seem to be qualia. But red colour experiences are nothing more than seeing red things; there are no red quales, even if there might seem to be; that is what I take Dennett to be saying. According to our investigations there are electromagnetic wavelengths that give rise to seeing coloured things in suitably equipped percipients, but those wavelengths are not themselves consciously experienced, obviously.

But he's denying qualia, clearly. — Manuel

As I said I take him to be denying that there are experiential entities, qualia, over and above the qualities that we find in things. I don't see how Dennett could seriously be thought to be denying that there are qualities that we routinely encounter and are aware of; tastes. colours, textures and so on. To deny that would be insane, and I don't believe Dennett is insane. As with consciousness, I take him to be just saying that those quantiies are not what we might think they are due to our intuitive tendency to reify and create superfluous entities via language.

I don't agree that liking or disliking certain foods necessarily has anything to do with judgement. The taste may simply be unpleasant and you might simply avoid it without any conscious thought about it at all

Of course Dennett doesn't say that 'consciousness is an illusion' in so many words, but it is the only reasonable surmise as to the implication of his ideas, which is that mind, or even being (as in, human being) is an illusory consequence of the co-ordinated activity of cellular and molecular processes which alone are real. He's a materialist, right? That's what materialism says. — Wayfarer

It's not the "only reasonable surmise"; it's a surmise based on certain assumptions that Dennett rejects. What we experience is what we experience, and only a fool or a mad person could deny that. Dennett doesn't deny that we experience, and that it seems as it does. It is a "consequence of the co-ordinated activity of cellular and molecular processes" according to Dennett, but not an illusory consequence; it is a real consequence and to say otherwise would make no logical sense. It is our intuitive ideas of what consciousness is, which are language-driven reifications; that consciousness is something non-physical and completely independent of the physical that is the illusion he refers to.

If you want to make claims about what Dennett says, then nothing will substitute adequately for Dennett's own words. That should be obvious, even to a fool.

From Dennett himself, Fool.

And I say I’m not the one misunderstanding him. I’ll leave it there except for this review. — Wayfarer

And typically nothing directly from Dennett to support your claim. Reviews of Dennett by others are not definitive in establishing just what it is he wants to say. I don't take your view on the matter seriously on account of the fact you haven't read him apart from anything else, and the fact that even mention of his name sends you into an hysterical attitude of self-righteous dismissal doesn't help.

Dennett went on record to say that consciousness is an illusion. — TheMadFool

If you want to support that assertion then quote directly from Dennett.

I don't think Dennett means we are robots i — Janus


You don't think Dennett means anything he says, because if you thought he did mean anything he actually says, then you would flee screaming from it. :lol:

Make no mistake - Dennett seems a nice person, civil, educated, and so on, but his "philosophy" so called is utterly soul-destroying and a symptom of "the decline of the West". — Wayfarer

C'mon Wayfarer, taking what I said out of context like that is "an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty".

But, in any case I don't flee screaming from the idea that we are unimaginably complex molecular robots, and I could never take seriously the idea that we don't experience anything ( which I know Dennett does not espouse) so nothing to flee from there. I expect nothing from this life other than the challenges and joys presented by the living of it. I neither affirm nor deny there is an afterlife; I am profoundly indifferent to the question; I like to cross my bridges when I come to them or fail to cross them when I don't. :wink: I disagree that Dennett's philosophy is soul-destroying to anyone who doesn't feel a need to believe in an immortal soul.

Also I think the "decline of the West" is political, social, economic and ecological, and hence a spiritual decline in a certain sense, but definitely not in the way you mean it. I think Dennett is an important subtle and creative thinker, even though I don't agree with all aspects of his thought (those that I am familiar enough with to have an opinion about, of course). You should try reading his work some time. Even if you feel you hate his ideas, remember the old adage "keep your friends close and your enemies closer": it pays to know really well what you seek to oppose, and who knows, if you maintain an open mind, you may even find you agree with him about certain things.

OK then, if not zombies, how about robots? — Wayfarer

I don't think Dennett means we are robots in the sense of lacking any experience. He thinks experience and consciousness are real, and are functions of organisms such as ourselves that are unimaginably complex molecular machines. What he does deny, as far as I understand him, is qualia. We experience things, and those things have qualities or better, are qualitative, but there is no quale over and above that.

Much of the way we think about these things depends on the way we habitually talk about things. For example, we taste beer, that tasting is the experience; there is no experience of the taste of beer apart from that. The fact that we can talk about the taste without talking about the beer doesn't entail that there is some quale "the taste of beer" over and above tasting beer, just as there is no redness apart from red things.

Another common example is that we all talk about having a body and having a mind; which fosters the notion that there is soul independent of the body (and of the mind?). ( That said we someimes even talk about having a soul; what's up with that? :chin: ). It is simpler and seems more accurate and less problematic to say that we are embodied minds or enminded bodies.

Just as naive realism is prereflectively common, so it goes with naive idealism too. — Janus

As I understand it Dennett favors a functionalist view of consciousness. On that kind of view consciousness emerges because of "causal or other functional relations among sensory inputs, internal states, and behavioral outputs". *

Dennett denies that zombies are possible or even conceivable, so Strawson's assertion that Dennett really thinks we are all zombies is not accurate. What he does say is that there is no coherent distinction between us and zombies, because anything that was physically constituted as we are would experience the same as we do.

"Can we really imagine zombies? Daniel Dennett thinks those who accept the conceivability of zombies have failed to imagine them thoroughly enough: ‘they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition’ (1995, p. 322. Marcus 2004 makes a related point; see also Woodling 2014). Given his broadly functionalist model of consciousness, he argues, we can see why the ‘putative contrast between zombies and conscious beings is illusory’ (325. See also his 1991; 1999). Consciousness is ‘not a single wonderful separable thing … but a huge complex of many different informational capacities’ (1995, 324. Cottrell 1999 supports this approach).*

*From here

From the Strawson paper:

“Are zombies possible?” Dennett asks. “They’re not just possible”, he replies, “they're
actual. We're all zombies” (1991: 406). Here his view seems very plain. His view is that
we’re not conscious at all in the ordinary sense of ‘conscious’. He adds a footnote—“it
would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of
context!” (1991: 406)

I take Dennett to mean that if we accepted for the sake of argument that zombies are possible, then we would all be zombies (just because they are physically identical to humans). And that's what he means by saying it would be an act of intellectual dishonesty to take this out of context (in other words to claim that he believes zombies are really possible, and that we are all zombies).

Strawson says that Dennett's view is that we are not conscious "in the ordinary sense of conscious"; which I think should be taken to mean not in the sense of being conscious that we intuitively (and by implication, naively) believe in, and of course there is no problem accepting that is Dennett's view, since he explicitly endorses it..Just as naive realism is prereflectively common, so it goes with naive idealism too.

I don't agree with Strawson's claim that Dennett is denying the existence of consciousness on the grounds that he uses the word in a way that "excludes what the word actually means", but at least he attempts to argue his case.

I'm not defending him against anything but being misunderstood. I actually addressed @TheMadFool because he or she repeated that same strawman attributed to Dennett.

You may disagree with Dennett's assertion that our introspection-based intuitive assessments of what consciousness is are not reliable, and you may disagree that science will ever be able to answer the question of what consciousness is and how it originated, and I have no argument with your right to hold such opinions, my objection is to misrepresenting Dennett or any philosopher.

I actually disagree with the latter opinion myself, because I think the questions "what is consciousness?" and "how is it possible for consciousness to emerge from the physical?" are ill-formed and based on ill-informed views. Those kinds of questions seem to me like asking similarly ill-formed questions such as 'what is matter?' and 'how is it possible for material objects to exist'.

And yet these questions keep getting asked again and again. It reminds me of Heidegger's response to Kant's well-quoted lament:

“It still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us … must be accepted merely on faith, and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof.” Critique of Pure Reason, B519. "

"The “scandal of philosophy” is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again."

This is not an argument that is tiresome; what is tiresome is to have to keep correcting the same misunderstanding over and over. And re the quote from the BBC; whoever said that obviously shares the same misunderstanding. If you are going to quote something quote something from the horse's mouth to support your apparent view that saying our misunderstanding of what consciousness is is an illusion, and saying that consciousness itself is not real are one and the same.

Despite your assertion I doubt you do grasp it, because if you did you would have no reason to erroneously contend that Dennett claims consciousness is an illusion.

Wouldn’t matter either way; it’s beside the point. — Mww

You mean it wouldn't matter if panspychism were true or that it wouldn't matter whether we thought it to be true?

Of course they do. Aesthetic judgements switch at the drop of a news cycle, or the newest gadget, or supposed slight from a passer-by; discursive judgements are bound by the knowledge relative to the times. Two different kinds of cycles of independent change. — Mww

Some likes and dislikes may change overnight just like some ill-considered opinions (I won't deign to call such opinions "discursive judgements", just as I wouldn't call such fickle likes and dislikes "aesthetic judgements").

Of course , I didn’t have in mind trivial aesthetic judgements , but the range of artistic expressions that you will likely to find if you walk into your local modern art museum or gallery. If you talk to those artists, you will find all sorts of complex underlying assumptions they share with the larger scientific community and which inform and direct their work. — Joshs

:up:

He says that our normal understanding of ourselves as agents is an illusion generated by the unconscious cellular processes operating according to the demands of adaptation. 'Unconscious competence', he calls it. He says it over and over, it's hard not to understand it. — Wayfarer

Right, you're just repeating what I have said in different words. Our understanding of ourselves as agents (or of what consciousness is) is an illusion. That is not to say that consciousness is an illusion, but that our intuitive "folk" understanding of its nature is. Likewise it is not to say that our agency is an illusion, but that our intuitive understanding of what it consists in is. Do you see the distinction now?

I am not sure what the purpose of the quoted passage was meant to be (or where it came from). The fact that the environment can be seen from different viewpoints and at different scales doesn't seem to speak to anything but the reality of a perception-independent environment to be seen from different viewpoints and scales.

As I said, I don't have a settled view on the matter. Perhaps I am not as concerned with whether the world warrants our understanding of it as McDowell is. What I do like is the implicit dissolution of the realist/ idealist polemic, which seems to be based on folksy understandings of what it means to be physical, what it means to be concrete, what it means to be mental, what it means to be conceptual and what it means to be logical; that is based on the conviction that we really do understand what these things mean.

I'm not convinced that McDowell's idea that the world is always already conceptually shaped can be exhaustively understood, but then neither can the idea that it is fundamentally physical or mental . So, I see McDowell's conclusion as a kind of deflationary minimalism that says that if we want to claim that our judgements about the world and our understanding of the world must be somehow warranted by actuality, then we are committed to the view that the world must be fundamentally conceptual in some way that exceeds our grasp or at least our ability to explicate.

That is, the "always already conceptually shaped" is simply a misstatement not justified by any history of science or of thought, but rather itself an absolute presupposition of (apparently) McDowell's thinking. — tim wood

I have no idea what you mean by "a misstatement not justified by any history of science or of thought", but in any case it is not an "absolute presupposition" but rather a conclusion. Go and read McDowell if you want to find out about his idea.

Styles of English Lit. and hem-lines, on the other hand, even within a relatively short time can change markedly. — tim wood

Changes of style do not equate to changes in aesthetic judgement, obviously. People, variously, still like ancient, medieval as well as modern art and literature. This is even true in the world of fashion, although it may be less so.

There's been nothing 'gradual' about the pace of development since the industrial revolution. Back in the Old Stone Age, it took half a million years for the form of the stone ax to evolve. — Wayfarer

You're probably thinking more about technological advancement than changes in scientific theories. Changes of aesthetic paradigms in the arts have been gradual in comparison to fads and fashion for example.The point is, in any case, that "taste" as I was using the term, does not "change on a dime".

Daniel Dennett's claims that consciousness is an illusion is of particular interest to me. — TheMadFool

It is tedious to see the same misunderstandings of Dennett's standpoint from people who haven't read his work. He does not claim that consciousness is an illusion, but that our sense that our intuitive understanding of what it is soundly based is illusory. Can you see the distinction there?

If one really were ‘agile and capable of pivot on a dime’, and the other ‘entrenched and not easily subject to change’ they would create entirely independent cycles of change , which they dont. — Joshs

You beat me to it! Of course aesthetic taste does not change that way, but is driven by gradually shifting paradigms, even more obviously than scientific movements are.

I'm not sure what you are aiming at here. But whatever, bear in mind when I referred to the idea that the world is always already conceptually shaped or logically structured that is by no means advocating pan-psychism.

So when I say "operate the same way we do; I am not referring to nature 'having a mind' whatever that could mean, but to its being logically structured.

We don't have any way to find out the answer to that by scientific investigation, obviously, so we are left with what would be the more plausible or coherent view in light of our experience and understanding. So, the problem that McDowell was concerned with was how our sensorially apprehended world could possibly justify our assertions about it if it were not always already conceptually shaped. So, he wants to collapse Kant's distinction between sensibility and understanding, claiming that our intuitions (in the Kantian sense of the term) are conceptually shaped through and through.

When I say "matter of taste" I mean it in the sense of judgement; analogous to the way that aesthetic judgement is not merely like preferring apples to oranges.

As I said, I don't hold a firm position on the matter, but if pressed I would lean towards McDowell's view.

Of course it's easy to see the rough equivalence of 'meta' and 'super' and 'natural' and 'physical, and etymology may show an even closer ancient equivalence, but is not a good guide to current usage, which is what is at issue.

On reflection I think you're right. The terms 'metaphysical' and 'supernatural' cannot be synonymous, since there is a metaphysical position termed metaphysical naturalism, and it seems ridiculous to refer to that position as supernatural naturalism.

I think so, inasmuch as physicalism claims that the metaphysical (in the sense of meta-empirical) nature of reality is physical. Since it claims that the metaphysical is just physical, and that there is nothing that is not physical, it may not see itself as being a metaphysical position.