Subjective and Objective consciousness

Quoting Philosophim

Awareness is a combination of two main factors: Observation and identification.

This is incorrect. Awareness does not depend or involve necessarily observation. You can be aware of millions of things that have nothing to do with observation. At the basis of all of them, is being aware of yourself. It doesn't involve any observation at all. Neither does being aware of your emotions, thinkng, etc. Awareness is a condition, a state. Observation is a process, an act. Awareness actually means knowing that something exists or is happening.

Just try it for yourself. Leaving concepts, descriptions, etc. aside, just sit back and experience that you are aware of your thoughts, your body, your movements. Do not observe anything. Just be aware of your thoughts, your body, your movements. This experience does not require any observation.

I have intervened at this point of your discussion because I think it has taken a wrong path, i.e. it is constructed around the the wrong assumption that awareness is based, depends --in part, together with identification as you say-- on observation. And by that occasion, I invite you to review and examine closely and from all its aspects the concept of awareness, because it is of most importance.

Quoting Alkis Piskas

At the basis of all of them, is being aware of yourself.

And how are you aware of yourself? Don't you need to observe something, then say, "I identify this as myself?"

Quoting Alkis Piskas

Neither does being aware of your emotions, thinkng, etc.

If you have no observation of emotions, thinking, etc, do you have a self? What are you if you have no emotions, thoughts, etc?

Quoting Alkis Piskas

Awareness actually means knowing that something exists or is happening.

Knowing that "something". What is this something? Isn't that something I observe? Notice that I pointed out that thoughts are part of observation. I'm not using perception or senses, I'm just noticing we need some type of "thing" to "assess".

Quoting Alkis Piskas

Leaving concepts, descriptions, etc. aside, just sit back and experience that you are aware of your thoughts, your body, your movements. Do not observe anything.

That's a contradiction to what I've defined. I need to observe something and then identify that as a "thought". I need to observe something and identify it as a "body". The combination of the two is awareness.

Quoting Alkis Piskas

I have intervened at this point of your discussion because I think it has taken a wrong path

Not a worry! Intervene wherever you think its incorrect.

It seems your main problem is with my definition of "observation". What I'm trying to get at is you need a "thing" that "you" experience. So perhaps it would be better if I used the words "experience and identity"?

I can’t imagine consciousness, would develop without perception. An infant born with no senses of any kind would not develop consciousness.

Quoting Philosophim

And how are you aware of yourself? Don't you need to observe something, then say, "I identify this as myself?"

Do you have to observe anything to know that you exist, that you are awake?

Quoting Philosophim

If you have no observation of emotions, thinking, etc, do you have a self? What are you if you have no emotions, thoughts, etc?

Do you have to feel or think anything to know that you exist? That you are a person? That you are reading this message?

Quoting Philosophim

Knowing that "something". What is this something?

Anything. Whatever. No some thing in particular. It could be e.g. just sitting on a chair. You don't have to obseve anything to be aware of that. The feeling of the chair on your bottom does not determine the fact that you are sitting. There must only exist a chair and your body be on it. No observation is needed for that.

You do not watch your legs and whole body move fast to be aware that you are running. You just know that you are running.

Quoting Philosophim

Notice that I pointed out that thoughts are part of observation.

Right. You can perceive, be aware of your thoughts. But you can also be aware of the absence of thoughts! (Being able to not think needs some training though. :smile:) As you can be aware of silence and space. These do not involve any perceiving/observation.

Quoting Philosophim

Leaving concepts, descriptions, etc. aside, just sit back and experience that you are aware of your thoughts, your body, your movements. Do not observe anything.
— Alkis Piskas
That's a contradiction to what I've defined. I need to observe something and then identify that as a "thought". I need to observe something and identify it as a "body". The combination of the two is awareness.

Yes I know that. Repeating it does not prove that I'm wrong! :smile:
Really, why are you refusing to do what I proposed, i.e. the little experiment? Don't you trust your experience?
Also, I wonder why do you chose to ignore all that I have said and shown in multiple ways about observation not being necessary for awareness to exist ...

So, since I'm being ignored, I have no other choice than to thank you for letting me express my views in your discussion and leave.

Quoting Alkis Piskas

And how are you aware of yourself? Don't you need to observe something, then say, "I identify this as myself?"
— Philosophim
Do you have to observe anything to know that you exist, that you are awake?

Yes. The state of wakefulness feels different from the state of sleeping. I'm pretty sure we're having a miscommunication on what "observation" is. The word is not important. My point is there are things that we encounter, and then we identify them. Simple as that.

Quoting Alkis Piskas

Do you have to feel or think anything to know that you exist? That you are a person? That you are reading this message?

Yes! I can't read a message without observing the message and identifying that they are words.

Quoting Alkis Piskas

Knowing that "something". What is this something?
— Philosophim
Anything. Whatever. No some thing in particular. It could be e.g. just sitting on a chair.

That's an observation combined with identification. Anything is observation. Identification is noting that anything is me sitting in a chair.

Quoting Alkis Piskas

The feeling of the chair on your bottom does not determine the fact that you are sitting.

The feeling is an observation. The identification is what determines whether I'm sitting.

Quoting Alkis Piskas

You do not watch your legs and whole body move fast to be aware that you are running. You just know that you are running.

Observe does not mean watch. Observation is feelings, thoughts, etc. Identification is noting that the combination of what you're observing can be identified as running.

Quoting Alkis Piskas

But you can also be aware of the absence of thoughts!

Yes, an observation that you're not thinking a particular thought can be identified as not having thoughts. You're taking observation to mean that we are ascertaining the existence of something. Observation is just your subjective experience without identity. Identity creates differences within that subjective experience.

Quoting Alkis Piskas

That's a contradiction to what I've defined. I need to observe something and then identify that as a "thought". I need to observe something and identify it as a "body". The combination of the two is awareness.
— Philosophim
Yes I know that. Repeating it does not prove that I'm wrong!

Pointing out its a contradiction does. Show that it is not a contradiction and you may have something.

Quoting Alkis Piskas

Also, I wonder why do you chose to ignore all that I have said and shown in multiple ways about observation not being necessary for awareness to exist ...

I'm not ignoring. I'm the OP who provided the definition and I'm trying to point out that you didn't understand what observation meant. Which is fine, no problem. But when responding you should attempt to understand the OP first right? We don't want straw man arguments.

Quoting Philosophim

But you can also be aware of the absence of thoughts!
— Alkis Piskas

Yes, an observation that you're not thinking a particular thought can be identified as not having thoughts. You're taking observation to mean that we are ascertaining the existence of something. Observation is just your subjective experience without identity. Identity creates differences within that subjective experience.

I may new misunderstanding both of you.

You cannot be aware of the absence of all thought. If you are aware, you are thinking. If you are thinking, you are aware.

And you cannot be aware that you are not thinking a particular thought. That would be thinking, "I'm not thinking about crayons right now."

Quoting Patterner

And you cannot be aware that you are not thinking a particular thought. That would be thinking, "I'm not thinking about crayons right now."

And yet you just did. Honestly, this is an incredibly unimportant part of the OP. What about the subjective vs objective consciousness?

Quoting Philosophim

And yet you just did.

You can't observe that you're not thinking a particular thought.

Not sure I understand the op either. It doesn't seem like you're discussing two kinds of consciousness. It seems like you're looking for a way to objectively identify another consciousness.

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

I know we terminated our conversation about consciousness on my thread because you felt there wasn’t much more that could be said, but I figured I would still put in my two cents into your thread to see if we can come to some agreement. Of course, it is your thread, so if you still feel as though there is nothing more to be productively said, then please feel free to terminate our discussion wherever you would like. I have a feeling that we are on polar opposites of the discussion when it comes to this topic, but that’s exactly what makes conversations the most interesting (;

To start, let me try to understand fully what you are saying. To me, it seems as though you are claiming there are two types of consciousness (i.e., subjective and objective) which are completely separable from each other; but, to me, when I read your post, it seemed like ‘objective’ consciousness is merely a more restricted scope of ‘subjective’ consciousness: the former seemed to be the latter with just the redaction of “what it is to be like a subjective experiencing” or, as you put it, “the viewpoint of consciousness itself”.

If that is correct, then I don’t see how “They are entirely separate realms of discussion and analysis”: when one analyzes how an organism has conscious experience of something, that is still “tied” to the same “consciousness” as that organism that is subjectively experiencing. I fear that this distinction implies that there could possibly be a being which has consciousness but doesn’t subjectively experience, but the consciousness we are studying objectively (from the side of behavior) is the same thing as the qualitative experience that the subject itself is having: we just don’t have direct, private access to it like that subject does.

This leads me to your definition of “consciousness” (i.e., “Awareness [consciousness] is a combination of two main factors: Observation and identification”): to me, being “conscious” and being “aware” (in the sense of observing and identifying) are not the same thing—perhaps this is a semantic dispute though. A being can be “aware” in the sense of being capable (to some degree) of observing its environment and identifying different aspects of its observation without having qualitative experience: for example, even basic AIs today can observe their environment and identify things (such as cups, tables, chairs, etc.) and they do not have conscious, qualitative experience: there is nothing to be like that AI (as of yet at least): it simply gathers input, interprets it, and produces output. When it touches something, it doesn’t feel it qualitatively; when it sees something, it has no qualitative sense of seeing happening there; when it hears, it doesn’t experience the sound itself but, rather, is just input/output like a computer. For these reasons, I think “awareness” should be distinguished from “consciousness”; otherwise, there becomes an ambiguity of what one is saying (e.g., are you talking about qualitative experience or just the ability to take in input and interpret the environment?--these are two very different things). Perhaps, is that what you are trying to get at with “objective” vs. “subjective” consciousness? Is “subjective” consciousness the qualitative experience and “objective” consciousness the mere awareness of the environment (plus the interpretation of it)?

For now, I think this is a good start.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Bob

Quoting Patterner

And yet you just did.
— Philosophim
You can't observe that you're not thinking a particular thought.

Not sure I understand the op either. It doesn't seem like you're discussing two kinds of consciousness. It seems like you're looking for a way to objectively identify another consciousness.

Quoting Patterner

You can't observe that you're not thinking a particular thought.

Look, I don't care. Its irrelevant so believe what you want. The point is not that I'm trying to identify another consciousness, its that consciousness can be divided into subjective and objective parts. If there's something you don't understand about that, feel free to ask.

Reply to Bob Ross
Very glad to see you Bob! The reason I bowed out from your thread is I felt my points would deviate too much from your original intent. I felt that your thread was addressing those who were somewhat familiar with your topic, and agreed and understood basic points. My questions and critiques seemed too far out of place for your OP, and I did not want to derail your thread from others.

Quoting Bob Ross

the former seemed to be the latter with just the redaction of “what it is to be like a subjective experiencing” or, as you put it, “the viewpoint of consciousness itself”.

I think you have the right of it. Its really a separate evaluation. Objective and subjective consciousness are two aspects of "consciousness". My point was to take the original concept and divide it into clearer and more distinct notions to avoid potential problems when they are blended together.

Quoting Bob Ross

If that is correct, then I don’t see how “They are entirely separate realms of discussion and analysis”: when one analyzes how an organism has conscious experience of something, that is still “tied” to the same “consciousness” as that organism that is subjectively experiencing. I fear that this distinction implies that there could possibly be a being which has consciousness but doesn’t subjectively experience, but the consciousness we are studying objectively (from the side of behavior) is the same thing as the qualitative experience that the subject itself is having: we just don’t have direct, private access to it like that subject does.

My point is that it is irrelevant when studying objective consciousness that we have an objective evaluation of the subjective consciousness. This is mostly because subjective consciousness of other beings is outside of knowledge. It is something we simply cannot know. No human knows what its like to be subjectively conscious as a dog. But objectively, does a dog have consciousness? Yes, by its ability to observe, identify, and act.

Quoting Bob Ross

A being can be “aware” in the sense of being capable (to some degree) of observing its environment and identifying different aspects of its observation without having qualitative experience: for example, even basic AIs today can observe their environment and identify things (such as cups, tables, chairs, etc.) and they do not have conscious, qualitative experience:

My argument is that they do. Do they have human qualitative consciousness? No. They can have robotic consciousness. What is it like to experience from within the system the ability to observe, identify, then make an action? Its impossible to know. As such, its irrelevant in objective evaluation.

The problem is we're constantly trying to attribute subjective consciousness to situations that are impossible to do so. Objectively, consciousness does not require you to be human, can we both agree on that? Is a dog conscious? A bat? A crab? They all have brains, though much more primitive than human brains. Therefore their consciousness, in what they are able to observe, identify, and act on, is much more limited. Will we ever know what its like to have the qualitative experience of a dog? No. That still doesn't mean we can't work with what we have.

An allegory is quantum physics or even odds. Both of these evaluative fields work within the limitations they know. Qauntum physics has a limit where you cannot both know a particles velocity and location at the same time. So we construct a system around which one we decide to measure. A deck of 52 playing cards has an unknown order, but we know what all the cards are. Therefore we can construct odds. Objective consciousness is simply removing that which cannot be possibly known, the actual subjective experience.

Quoting Bob Ross

are you talking about qualitative experience or just the ability to take in input and interpret the environment?--these are two very different things

Are they? When a simple camera takes a picture, it simply processes the light. It cannot identify anything within that light. Only a consciousness can take in light, then form some identity out of it like a cloud, a sun, and grass. To observe, then identify, doesn't some "thing" have to observe, then match it to an identity? Is that not the qualitative experience? Some "thing" must maintain both the observation, and actively match an identity. We don't have to know what that's like for different observers and identifiers, but we can say the state of observing and identifying is consciousness at the most basic level.

If we attach a program to a camera that can identify things like clouds, a sun, and grass in the picture, then that is what it is conscious of. But that is ALL it is conscious of. It does not have feelings, or the ability to have the four other senses human's do. But there is something that retains an observation long enough to process through several identities, then match them.

Quoting Bob Ross

Is “subjective” consciousness the qualitative experience and “objective” consciousness the mere awareness of the environment (plus the interpretation of it)?

No, subjective consciousness is merely what it is like to be the thing which is conscious. Objective consciousness is the observation and confirmation that there is consciousness apart from the subjective experience itself. Thus if we can observe an entity that can observe, identify, and act, we can conclude it is conscious at least within what it can observe, identify, and act upon.

Quoting Patterner

I can’t imagine consciousness, would develop without perception. An infant born with no senses of any kind would not develop consciousness.

Was Helen Keller less conscious than most people?

Quoting RogueAI

I can’t imagine consciousness, would develop without perception. An infant born with no senses of any kind would not develop consciousness.
— Patterner

Was Helen Keller less conscious than most people?

She was born with all her senses. She lost them when she was 19 months old, and perception begins in the womb. Also, she did not lose all of her senses. She lost her sight and hearing.

Quoting Patterner

She was born with all her senses. She lost them when she was 19 months old, and perception begins in the womb. Also, she did not lose all of her senses. She lost her sight and hearing.

Let's assume we have a being born with only one sense, touch. Is it going to be less conscious than someone with all five senses? Or is consciousness like a switch? You either have it or you don't?

Quoting Philosophim

Look, I don't care. Its irrelevant so believe what you want.

Thank you. I believe that I cannot claim I am not thinking about crayons if I think, "I am not thinking about crayons."

Quoting Philosophim

The point is not that I'm trying to identify another consciousness, its that consciousness can be divided into subjective and objective parts. If there's something you don't understand about that, feel free to ask.

I did say I wasn't sure if I understood the op.

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

Very glad to see you Bob! The reason I bowed out from your thread is I felt my points would deviate too much from your original intent. I felt that your thread was addressing those who were somewhat familiar with your topic, and agreed and understood basic points. My questions and critiques seemed too far out of place for your OP, and I did not want to derail your thread from others.

Oh I see: fair enough!

Although I understand it better, I still don’t think I have completely pinned down your terminology; so let me ask for further clarification (and then I will revisit your post to respond adequately).

Is “qualitative experience” (i.e., qualia) different to you than observing, identifying, and acting (or are they the same)?

Is “awareness” different than “qualitative experience”? Is it the same as observing, identifying, and acting?

Do those terms, to you, refer to the exact same thing?

Am I correct in saying that, under your view, “objective” and “subjective” consciousness are both referring to qualitative experience? Awareness? Both?

This is mostly because subjective consciousness of other beings is outside of knowledge. It is something we simply cannot know.

Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems like you are saying that we can objectively know that other beings have qualitative experience and that there is something to be like that subject but we cannot know what it is like to be that subject: is that correct?

They can have robotic consciousness.

Are you saying that there is something to be like a robot as a subject (but we just can’t know what that is like) and it has qualitative experience?

Objectively, consciousness does not require you to be human, can we both agree on that? Is a dog conscious? A bat? A crab?

I agree, but I think this is equally true within your “subjective” consciousness as well. I am not sure what the distinction is doing here (in terms of specifying only “objective” consciousness does not require you to be human).

To observe, then identify, doesn't some "thing" have to observe, then match it to an identity?

So this is where I need to re-evaluate depending on what you mean by the terms “awareness”, “qualitative experience”, “consciousness”, and “observation”. I don’t hold that a camera + a computerized interpreter (of the images) equates to a conscious being but I do agree that the camera is aware (as an observer) to some limited degree (in order to take in a photo of the environment). I just don’t hold consciousness and observation as the same thing, so can you elaborate on what you mean? Are they the same to you?

Is that not the qualitative experience?

No, I do not hold that there is something to be like a camera + computerized interpreter (of those images or what have you). I do not hold that the camera has qualitative experience: all that is occurring is quantitative measurements through-and-through. It quantifies its environment and then quantitatively analyzes the image (or what have you). qualitative experience, on the other hand, can’t be completely quantified—e.g., the subjectively experienced redness of the truck can’t be accurately quantified, whereas the camera is capturing quantitatively what it thinks is there and displaying it quantitatively via pixels (in hex encoded colors or what have you), of which you qualitatively experience when you look at the image via the camera screen (after taking a picture). There’s nothing qualitative happening in terms of the internal processes of the camera nor is the camera subjectively experiencing anything (I would say).

Objective consciousness is the observation and confirmation that there is consciousness apart from the subjective experience itself.

I don’t see how you can come to understand a thing as conscious but yet say you haven’t thereby posited it as subjectively experiencing: could you elaborate?

By my lights, the whole point of saying something is conscious is to grant that it has subjective experience, and the outer, objective analysis of that looks like the an aware, organic entity. It sounds like, under your view, there could be a being which is conscious but doesn’t have any subjective experience but, to me, that’s like saying that we can determine something thinks while holding it may not have a thinker.

Bob

Reply to RogueAI

Was Helen Keller less conscious than most people?

I would say so.

I would say that if you lose a finger, you are exactly that much less conscious than someone who has the same finger. You no longer have the conscious biology where your finger once was, like having the tactile and other sensations that you would have otherwise.

Reply to NOS4A2

It scares me when you say things that I agree with...

:wink:

Quoting RogueAI

Let's assume we have a being born with only one sense, touch. Is it going to be less conscious than someone with all five senses? Or is consciousness like a switch? You either have it or you don't?

If you mean a human, my guess (based on no education in these matters :D) is that such a person could become conscious. There is a lot of wiring that takes place in the brain for many years after birth. It happens as the person interacts with the world. The brain evolved with our typical perceptions, so maybe it easily wires when the interactions are through the full compliment of senses? That's just a guess off the top of my head. But that doesn’t mean many things aren’t taking place even without the full complement. And the human brain still has its DNA telling it to grow in particular ways, so it’s trying, even if only getting interactions through touch.

Maybe it has more to do with communicating than simply perceiving and noticing what you're perceiving? It’s probably easier to communicate more ideas with more senses. Maybe a person's degree of consciousness depends on how well you can teach them to communicate.

Quoting Bob Ross

Is “qualitative experience” (i.e., qualia) different to you than observing, identifying, and acting (or are they the same)?

They are slightly different. Qualitative experience is the subjective act of observing and identifying. You can act as well, its just not required to subjectively be conscious. Think about someone in a coma that was unresponsive, but later comes out of it and is able to repeat conversations they heard while unresponsive. They were conscious, just unable to act.

Observing identifying and acting are objective measures of consciousness that can be known from monitoring a thing. Put a puzzle in front of a person, and they'll observe, attempt to identify, and make an action based on that identity.

Quoting Bob Ross

Is “awareness” different than “qualitative experience”? Is it the same as observing, identifying, and acting?

Quoting Philosophim

Awareness is a combination of two main factors: Observation and identification.

Qualitative experience would be the experience of observing and identifying from the subject observing and identifying.

Quoting Bob Ross

Am I correct in saying that, under your view, “objective” and “subjective” consciousness are both referring to qualitative experience? Awareness? Both?

No, only subjective consciousness refers to qualitative experience. Its not that objective experience denies that subjective consciousness exist, it just knows that it cannot be known and as such cannot be determined by an objective evaluation.

Quoting Bob Ross

Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems like you are saying that we can objectively know that other beings have qualitative experience and that there is something to be like that subject but we cannot know what it is like to be that subject: is that correct?

No, we cannot actually know whether other beings qualitatively experience, we can only assume or make an induction that they do. As there is no way to objectively measure or comprehend what another's qualitative experience would be like, its outside of our ability to know. Its like this: Both of our eyes see the wavelength for the color green, but I can never know if what you subjectively experience as green is the same as what I subjectively experience as green.

Quoting Bob Ross

They can have robotic consciousness.

Are you saying that there is something to be like a robot as a subject (but we just can’t know what that is like) and it has qualitative experience?

We can assume that there is, but we cannot know that there is. Whether a robot has qualitative experience and what its like is outside of the realm of knowledge.

Quoting Bob Ross

I don’t hold that a camera + a computerized interpreter (of the images) equates to a conscious being but I do agree that the camera is aware (as an observer) to some limited degree (in order to take in a photo of the environment). I just don’t hold consciousness and observation as the same thing, so can you elaborate on what you mean?

Something aware can both observe and identify. A camera that receives light through the lens and then prints it onto a photo is a simple observer. It does not identify anything in the picture itself, it just observes and records. An identifier is something which can look at that picture and think, "That part of the picture is a cloud". Consciousness requires both observation and the ability to identify. Observation or the ability to identify alone do not make consciousness.

Quoting Bob Ross

Is that not the qualitative experience?

No, I do not hold that there is something to be like a camera + computerized interpreter (of those images or what have you). I do not hold that the camera has qualitative experience: all that is occurring is quantitative measurements through-and-through.

And you can't know that it has qualitative experience, anymore than you can know any other objectively conscious being has qualitative experience. Bob, can you prove that I have qualitative experience? Can you know it for certain? It is just as difficult to prove I have qualitative experience as it is to prove a dog has qualitative experience. Since we cannot, when talking about what we can know objectively, qualitative experience of beings or things other than ourselves is unnecessary.

Quoting Bob Ross

e.g., the subjectively experienced redness of the truck can’t be accurately quantified, whereas the camera is capturing quantitatively what it thinks is there and displaying it quantitatively via pixels (in hex encoded colors or what have you), of which you qualitatively experience when you look at the image via the camera screen (after taking a picture). There’s nothing qualitative happening in terms of the internal processes of the camera nor is the camera subjectively experiencing anything (I would say).

I'll refer back to seeing the wavelength green vs experiencing the qualitative color of what green is to you. Its not that there isn't anything qualitatively happening to other people. Its that its outside of our knowledge. Because we cannot prove it, it is unimportant for us what exact color we see when we see the wavelength green. Same with the qualitative experience of an ai observing and identifying objects in a picture. We can note it sees the wavelength of green, but we cannot know what that experience is for it. Since we cannot know if it does or does not have qualitative experience, its subjective consciousness is not considered in objective consciousness evaluation.

Quoting Bob Ross

Objective consciousness is the observation and confirmation that there is consciousness apart from the subjective experience itself.

I don’t see how you can come to understand a thing as conscious but yet say you haven’t thereby posited it as subjectively experiencing: could you elaborate?

Certainly. Consciousness is described as anything which can observe and identify. The only way we can objectively know if something is consciousness is by observing its actions. There are only certain actions one can take which determine consciousness. If I put iodine in a person's blood, it will show signs of hormones for your thyroid. What is the qualitative experience of having iodine in your blood? If someone put it into our blood stream, we would not observe it by feeling in our blood, nor be able to identify it. Therefore we are not conscious of it.

However, stick a needle in someone's skin to insert the iodine, and a person can identify the feel and sight of the needle, and identify that it is a needle, or at least something that causes pain. Thus the person is conscious of the needle. Do we know what they feel? No. That is the subjective consciousness of the person. Does it matter subjectively what they feel when evaluating objectively whether they are conscious or not? No.

Quoting Bob Ross

By my lights, the whole point of saying something is conscious is to grant that it has subjective experience, and the outer, objective analysis of that looks like the an aware, organic entity. It sounds like, under your view, there could be a being which is conscious but doesn’t have any subjective experience but, to me, that’s like saying that we can determine something thinks while holding it may not have a thinker.

I am going a step further. I'm saying its impossible to know if something else besides yourself has qualitative experience because its purely subjective. Can you prove it otherwise? Can you demonstrate with full knowledge that I have subjective qualitative experience?

Great points Bob, glad to see you thinking about it!

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

Thank you for the elaboration, as I think I am beginning to penetrate into your terminology. However, I want to keep explaining it back to you to ensure I am getting it right. We simply do not use the terms the same, which is totally fine.

As I am now understanding you, “consciousness”, in general, is any being which “observes” and “identifies” its environment (and, as an optional addition, acts upon it); and “objective consciousness” is simply to be “conscious” (in the sense I defined above) whereas “subjective” consciousness is to be “conscious” plus qualia. In other words, every “subjectively conscious” being is “objectively conscious”, but not necessarily every “objectively conscious” being is “subjectively conscious”: is that fair?

However, there’s another aspect to this that I am sensing: the terms “objective” and “subjective” are meant to distinguish between the epistemic access we have to consciousness, and that is perhaps why you didn’t just use the term “consciousness” to refer to “an observing and identifying being” and “qualitative experience” (or what have you) as “an subjectively observing and identifying being”. Is that correct?

In terms of the distinction in epistemic access, I am understanding you to be claiming that we can only “know” of “objective aspects of consciousness”, where “knowledge” is perhaps restricted to what is empirically verifiable? Is that correct?

You can act as well, its just not required to subjectively be conscious. Think about someone in a coma that was unresponsive, but later comes out of it and is able to repeat conversations they heard while unresponsive. They were conscious, just unable to act.

I think perhaps “acting”, in the sense that you are using it (i.e., a visible bodily motion), is insufficient (which I think you are alluding to here). I think of being conscious as having receptivity (i.e., ability to receive input), sensibility (i.e., ability to acquire sensations from the receptors), knowledge of one’s environment (i.e., whether that be perception, self-knowledge, or basic stimulus responses), and having mental activity (e.g., qualia, thoughts, concepts, etc.). For you, I would imagine the last element there is not required (for one to be conscious), but the first three I think fit well into what I think you are trying to convey: I don’t think it matters if a being is actively displaying high-level bodily motions (i.e., actions). Maybe we can agree on that.

Observing identifying and acting are objective measures of consciousness that can be known from monitoring a thing

I take you to mean that observing, identifying, and acting are pragmatically useful for determining if one has receptivity, sensibility, and some knowledge of its environment: is that correct?

Qualitative experience would be the experience of observing and identifying from the subject observing and identifying.

This is where I get a bit confused: are you saying that the exact same “observing” and “identifying” is occurring objectively and the only subjective aspect is the viewpoint of the subject which is objectively “observing” and “identifying”? Because then it sounds like you might be saying qualia are not subjective, but merely the viewpoint of a subject that is having them is.

No, we cannot actually know whether other beings qualitatively experience, we can only assume or make an induction that they do.
…
Its like this: Both of our eyes see the wavelength for the color green, but I can never know if what you subjectively experience as green is the same as what I subjectively experience as green.

To me, your example argues a different point than your original claim (in that paragraph): the example is already conceding that “there is something to be like me” but that you can’t know what that is like, whereas your original claim was that we can’t even know that “there is something to be like me” (from you viewpoint). Are you claiming both of these claims (i.e., that you cannot know that there is something to be like me from your perspective and that you cannot know, even if there was something to be like me, what it would be like to be me)?

We can assume that there is, but we cannot know that there is. Whether a robot has qualitative experience and what its like is outside of the realm of knowledge.
…
Bob, can you prove that I have qualitative experience?

Firstly, I just want to note that I do not think I need certainty to “know” things. Yes, I think that I can “know” you have qualitative experience insofar as it would be special pleading of me to think of myself as the only human being who has it. No I am not certain of it.

Secondly, I am be confident enough to say that a camera and an AI do not have qualitative experience because I can know what they are made of and there is no room for qualitative anything: it is all mechanical, quantitative operations. I am not certain that a pool of water cannot, all else being equal, turn into a car; but I am very confident that it won’t.

If you give me something which only has quantitative measuring capabilities, then I expect it to not have qualitative experience (but I do expect it to have awareness in the sense of the ability to quantify its environment).

It is just as difficult to prove I have qualitative experience as it is to prove a dog has qualitative experience. Since we cannot, when talking about what we can know objectively, qualitative experience of beings or things other than ourselves is unnecessary.

I would like to note that it is very necessary to prove it if one is a reductive physicalist: the entire metaphysical theory is riding on it.

Also, it seems like ‘proof’ to you implies certainty: is that correct? If so, then I agree that I cannot prove that a dog has qualitative experience, but then again I can’t prove that boiling eggs in water will cook them either. If I remember correctly, then the vast majority of your “knowledge” is cogency (i.e., inductions and abductions), right? If so, then you can run a very confident and cogent argument (‘proof’) that dogs have qualitative experience, but it doesn’t provide certainty for sure.

I'll refer back to seeing the wavelength green vs experiencing the qualitative color of what green is to you. Its not that there isn't anything qualitatively happening to other people. Its that its outside of our knowledge

To me, it seems as though you are claiming sometimes that we can’t know that other people have qualitative experience (viz., that there is something to be like them: they have qualia) and other times you are conceding that point, like the above paragraph, and saying just can’t know what it would be like to be like them.

Can you prove it otherwise? Can you demonstrate with full knowledge that I have subjective qualitative experience?

Why would I need to prove it with full knowledge (and am assuming full certainty) for it to be worth believing (or claiming to know)?

Bob

Quoting Bob Ross

In terms of the distinction in epistemic access, I am understanding you to be claiming that we can only “know” of “objective aspects of consciousness”, where “knowledge” is perhaps restricted to what is empirically verifiable? Is that correct?

Yes, with an addition just to be sure. A subjective consciousness can know its own qualia, no one else can.

Quoting Bob Ross

I don’t think it matters if a being is actively displaying high-level bodily motions (i.e., actions). Maybe we can agree on that.

Activity is not needed for subjective consciousness. It is just that activity is needed to objectively conclude that another being is conscious. Now, it may be the case that we can scan a brain and ascertain that the person is conscious, but unable to act. For an intro, this side exception seemed unneeded to ensure the initial idea was not overly complex.

Quoting Bob Ross

Observing identifying and acting are objective measures of consciousness that can be known from monitoring a thing

I take you to mean that observing, identifying, and acting are pragmatically useful for determining if one has receptivity, sensibility, and some knowledge of its environment: is that correct?

No, I very purposefully excluded anything that had to do with perception as a requirement for consciousness. Perception is often associated with the five senses. Observation does not preclude perception, but it does not necessitate it. If you are thinking about an image in your mind, you are observing something. When you identify that image, feeling, thought, etc, you are identifying. You can also observe perceptions, have sensibility, and know your environment while being conscious, but those can all be bundled under variations of observation and identity.

Quoting Bob Ross

Qualitative experience would be the experience of observing and identifying from the subject observing and identifying.

This is where I get a bit confused: are you saying that the exact same “observing” and “identifying” is occurring objectively and the only subjective aspect is the viewpoint of the subject which is objectively “observing” and “identifying”? Because then it sounds like you might be saying qualia are not subjective, but merely the viewpoint of a subject that is having them is.

The viewpoint of the subject is what I mean by "subjective". It is formed by the viewer, and can only be experienced by the viewer. That subjective experience is what they have, which is undeniable. Subjective does not mean unreasonable, illogical, or unprovable. Subjective merely means that it is an experience that can only be known to the entity having it.

For example, I like the color blue. Its my favorite color. No one else can say objectively that its my favorite color, because there's no way of proving it. I could be lying. Only I know if blue is my favorite color. The fact that blue is my favorite color also does not objectively make blue the best color for everyone. The subjective conscious is simply the personal experience of being conscious, or qualia.

Quoting Bob Ross

To me, your example argues a different point than your original claim (in that paragraph): the example is already conceding that “there is something to be like me” but that you can’t know what that is like,

To clarify, the "something like me" would be the objectively observable nature of being a conscious being. I cannot say "subjectively like me". But I can observe a being and determine it is conscious by the actions in commits, because only a conscious being can observe, identify, and act on that combination.

Think about a fly. A fly can observe the smell of trash, then decide to land on it. Do we know if it thinks about it morally? If the fly wonders at its own existence? No. But what we can know is it scans the environment, identifies, and acts upon it. Do we need to know the flies experience of being a fly to objectively conclude it has a basic consciousness? No. Its beyond our knowledge, so we simply exclude it when evaluating what we can know.

Quoting Bob Ross

Firstly, I just want to note that I do not think I need certainty to “know” things. Yes, I think that I can “know” you have qualitative experience insofar as it would be special pleading of me to think of myself as the only human being who has it. No I am not certain of it.

You believe I have qualitative experience. Certainty does not give knowledge, logically correct identification from our observations do. You know that I'm conscious because of the actions I've done here. The words that I've written cannot be done without observation and identification. Do you know the feelings I had when I wrote them? No. Do you know all of the other thoughts whirling in my head that are not necessarily conveyed by the words that I wrote? No. Is it important that we know that I have a subjective qualia, or what that subjective qualia is for you to conclude I'm objectively conscious? Not at all.

Objectivity assumes a logic that stands despite subjective challenges to it. We cannot objectively note that everyone sees green as everyone else, but we can objectively note that if someone is observing the wavelength of green, they are at least perceiving a color we can all agree is green. So if you cannot objectively prove that I experience qualia, its not a matter of belief, its a matter of something you cannot know.

Quoting Bob Ross

Secondly, I am be confident enough to say that a camera and an AI do not have qualitative experience because I can know what they are made of and there is no room for qualitative anything: it is all mechanical, quantitative operations.

And yet that's not logical. I can look at a brain, know what it is made of and see that there is no room for qualitative anything: it is all chemical, quantitative operations. So according to your argument, you could confidently say that you know no human being has qualitative experience, including yourself. This is a contradiction, so we know it to be wrong.

Quoting Bob Ross

I would like to note that it is very necessary to prove it if one is a reductive physicalist: the entire metaphysical theory is riding on it.

Bob, I don't care about philosophical identities. They're useful as a digest to get into particular thoughts, but the identity itself is unimportant. What's important to me is whether arguments have consistent, logical applications that allow us to function in the world optimally. If my points blow through some type of philosophical ideology but meet the criteria I value, so be it.

Quoting Bob Ross

Also, it seems like ‘proof’ to you implies certainty: is that correct?

No, proof would be a logically consistent belief that is concurrent with reality, (or "what is") and not denied by it. We can have incredible certainty in beliefs that are wrong. Its been a while, but just think back along the lines of my knowledge paper if you need details.

Quoting Bob Ross

If I remember correctly, then the vast majority of your “knowledge” is cogency (i.e., inductions and abductions), right?

No, the vast majority of what we hold are beliefs, and if we're logical, we attempt to hold onto the most cogent beliefs we can when we are unable to know whether that belief is right. It seems a cogent belief that other beings can experience qualia, but it cannot be known what that qualia is like for them. We can objectively know whether something has consciousness or not, regardless of what we personally believe.

Quoting Bob Ross

To me, it seems as though you are claiming sometimes that we can’t know that other people have qualitative experience (viz., that there is something to be like them: they have qualia) and other times you are conceding that point, like the above paragraph, and saying just can’t know what it would be like to be like them.

We cannot know, but we believe that others have qualia. But beliefs about something are not objective, therefore they do not belong in objective analysis or discussion. It is not that we cannot speak or have further beliefs about subjective consciousness, it is simply a recognition that such discussions can at most only be beliefs, and not objective certainties.

Quoting Bob Ross

Can you prove it otherwise? Can you demonstrate with full knowledge that I have subjective qualitative experience?

Why would I need to prove it with full knowledge (and am assuming full certainty) for it to be worth believing (or claiming to know)?

You can find worth in believing that I have qualia. But you cannot know it. Once again, this inability to know does not mean we cannot reasonably use cogency to think about the possibilities of qualia. Its just that we have to understand that such discussions can never be objective discussions. There will always be an uncertain belief. There is nothing wrong with this, as there are many many things that we cannot truly know yet we reasonably plan and work with. I don't know what tomorrow will bring or if I will even be alive, but I still plan with a general prediction of what will happen. Same with subjective consciousness.

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

Thank you for the clarifications: now that I have a better grasp (hopefully) of what you are saying, let me offer some worries/critiques I have. To simplify it down, here are the three main ones:

1. The fact that a being observes, identifies, and acts does not entail, in itself, that it has qualia.

2. The fact that a being has qualia does not entail, in itself, that there is something to be like it.

3. Qualia is irreducible to brain states.

I will let you navigate the discussion where you deem fit. Apart from the parts of your post (that I think) fall under one of the above categories, here’s my responses:

But beliefs about something are not objective, therefore they do not belong in objective analysis or discussion

Beliefs are behavioral attitudes towards things which are objective and, as such, absolutely pertain to objective inquiry. I don’t think you can name a single field of study which isn’t predicated on beliefs—not even science.

We use beliefs to try and figure out what reality is, and most of our “knowledge” is made up of beliefs about the world (based off of evidence): this includes science and any empirical inquiry anyone can do.

For example, I believe that “every change has a cause”, and this is one of the axioms of science—one of the axioms of studying objectively brains.

I don’t think you can neatly separate beliefs from some sort of objective inquiry like you are implying.

And yet that's not logical. I can look at a brain, know what it is made of and see that there is no room for qualitative anything: it is all chemical, quantitative operations. So according to your argument, you could confidently say that you know no human being has qualitative experience, including yourself. This is a contradiction, so we know it to be wrong.

This isn’t true: you can’t account for qualia, which you do know exists because you have it, by looking at the quantitative processes of the brain. We can account for a camera simply by its quantitative processes and parts that produce those quantified measurements. I don’t see any contradiction here.

Bob, I don't care about philosophical identities. They're useful as a digest to get into particular thoughts, but the identity itself is unimportant. What's important to me is whether arguments have consistent, logical applications that allow us to function in the world optimally. If my points blow through some type of philosophical ideology but meet the criteria I value, so be it.

Fair enough! Let me re-phrase it: it is important if you are claiming that there is a mind-independent world which has mind-independent brains that produce qualia.

proof would be a logically consistent belief that is concurrent with reality

The idea that a dog has qualia is logically consistent and concurs with reality; but yet you said we cannot ‘prove’ it: why? The belief that a dog has qualia is a reasonable, cogent, and evidence based claim which meets your definition of proof.

I take you to mean that observing, identifying, and acting are pragmatically useful for determining if one has receptivity, sensibility, and some knowledge of its environment: is that correct? — Bob Ross

No, I very purposefully excluded anything that had to do with perception as a requirement for consciousness. Perception is often associated with the five senses.

By “knowledge of its environment”, I am not referring to “perception” necessarily, so I agree with you here; and “sensibility” is not referring to only human (or higher animal like) senses but, rather, sensing at all (which includes mechanical sensing).

That subjective experience is what they have, which is undeniable.

Under your view, how is this undeniable? I thought you are claiming that we can’t know.

For example, I like the color blue. Its my favorite color. No one else can say objectively that its my favorite color, because there's no way of proving it

Although you are correct that “I like the color blue” is subjective, it doesn’t follow that no one can invalidate that claim. If it turns out, unbeknownst to you, that you don’t like the color blue, then your proclamation of “I like the color blue” is in fact false. A proposition being subjective just means that the truthity is indexical (i.e., relative to the subject at hand), not that the subject is 100% correct pertaining thereto. You can absolutely get your preferences wrong (e.g., be delusional or simply really bad at psycho analysis). If the proposition “I like the color blue” is factually (i.e., objectively evaluated) as false and you claim it to be true, then you are wrong: it doesn’t matter that we are talking about your preferences.

I will stop here for now and let you respond,

Bob

Quoting Philosophim

The viewpoint of the subject is what I mean by "subjective". It is formed by the viewer, and can only be experienced by the viewer. That subjective experience is what they have, which is undeniable.

What if I said that the viewpoint of the subject is thought, not experienced? The subject perceives (experiences) things from some perspective (viewpoint) but does not experience the viewpoint itself. Further to that would be to say that the subject does not experience subjectivity or being a subject.

I think subjective experience is often conflated with and counted as the experience of subjectivity.

Quoting Bob Ross

But beliefs about something are not objective, therefore they do not belong in objective analysis or discussion

Beliefs are behavioral attitudes towards things which are objective and, as such, absolutely pertain to objective inquiry. I don’t think you can name a single field of study which isn’t predicated on beliefs—not even science.

Let me clarify. Its not that we cannot start with beliefs. But beliefs must become hypotheses and be tested. Everything has a cause is known, because anytime we've tried to prove something doesn't have a cause, we fail. Its plausible that one day we will encounter something that doesn't have a prior cause, but it is currently something that we have never encountered before, so its not in the realm of possibility.

Quoting Bob Ross

This isn’t true: you can’t account for qualia, which you do know exists because you have it, by looking at the quantitative processes of the brain. We can account for a camera simply by its quantitative processes and parts that produce those quantified measurements. I don’t see any contradiction here.

I can account for that. But only me. In brain surgery they keep you conscious. They'll stimulate certain portions of your brain and ask you to respond. In this case, they'll ask you what you're feeling, or your qualia. Now can the surgeon know what its like when you say, "I'm thinking of a tree"? Of course not. There's no way to objectively measure that you are seeing a tree, or what that tree looks like exactly. They have to believe that you're giving them a close enough picture to what you're experiencing. But if they stimulate that brain state, they can cause you to think and feel things that you had no intent of thinking or feeling.

But lets go even simpler, alcohol or anesthesia. We know that when these chemicals enter your blood stream and hit your brain, your consciousness diminishes and can be blacked out entirely. Do I know the exact qualia of someone else getting blacked out? No. But I know my own.

If it is the case that we can use quantitative processes to change our own qualia, then the argument I made stands and you're still holding a contradiction.

Quoting Bob Ross

Fair enough! Let me re-phrase it: it is important if you are claiming that there is a mind-independent world which has mind-independent brains that produce qualia.

From my point of view there is a mind independent world, but I do not believe brains are fully independent from our minds. Our minds are a portion of our brain, and the part of the brain that is conscious.

Quoting Bob Ross

The idea that a dog has qualia is logically consistent and concurs with reality; but yet you said we cannot ‘prove’ it: why? The belief that a dog has qualia is a reasonable, cogent, and evidence based claim which meets your definition of proof.

Where is the evidence of qualia? If I operate on a dog and open up the brain, do I see the image and smell the smells the dog is experiencing? No. Thus we run into the philosophical zombie example.

"A philosophical zombie (or "p-zombie") is a being in a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal person but does not have conscious experience.[1]

For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would behave exactly the way any conscious human would."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

Some debate has been done over the meaning of this, but I am keen to observe one fact we can all agree on: No one can prove that a philosophical zombie can't exist. In fact, there's evidence for it in a well diagnosed issue with some animals: Blindsight.

I'm citing Luke's post here which then sights a post on Blindsight. I think its a fascinating read. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14286/a-potential-solution-to-the-hard-problem/p1

Here's an excerpt:
"In the blind area, DB himself maintained that he had no visual awareness. Nonetheless, Weiskrantz asked him to guess the location and shape of an object that lay in this area. To everyone’s surprise, he consistently guessed correctly. To DB himself, his success in guessing seemed quite unreasonable. So far as he was concerned, he wasn’t the source of his perceptual judgments, his sight had nothing to do with him. Weiskrantz named this capacity ‘blindsight’: visual perception in the absence of any felt visual sensations."
https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness

So here we have a being that is objectively conscious, but does not have subjective qualia to experience the location and shape he's obviously observing and identifying. We could say, "Well maybe he's lying." That's true, perhaps he's a very convincing liar. We can't know, because we can't experience consciousness from that person's subjective viewpoint. We can't prove that they have it, and we can't prove that they don't have it.

Now I do want to throw a caveat out there. It is not that we cannot come to a cogent set of beliefs that work consistently well enough for communication or evaluation in tandem with objective assessment. But it is only that, cogent beliefs. I can objectively state that when anesthesia is applied to a person, they black out. But I cannot objectively state what is it like for that person to black out.

Quoting Bob Ross

That subjective experience is what they have, which is undeniable.

Under your view, how is this undeniable? I thought you are claiming that we can’t know.

My apologies, that was me being unclear. My own subjective experience is what I have, and is undeniable. Whether a something beyond myself does, or does not have a subjective experience is undeniable from its own viewpoint. What is a belief and not knowledge, is that I can claim what that subjective experience from the view point of that being is like, or even that it has, or does not have any all.

Quoting Bob Ross

Although you are correct that “I like the color blue” is subjective, it doesn’t follow that no one can invalidate that claim. If it turns out, unbeknownst to you, that you don’t like the color blue, then your proclamation of “I like the color blue” is in fact false. A proposition being subjective just means that the truthity is indexical (i.e., relative to the subject at hand), not that the subject is 100% correct pertaining thereto.

Agreed! What we can claim though is that when you claimed that you liked the color blue, you saw the color blue and you identified it as a color you liked at that moment. Its not whether something is a fact which is qualia, it is the experience of observing and identifying. Whether that is correct, or incorrect does not deny the subjective experience of that action itself.

Fantastic viewpoints as always Bob!

Quoting Janus

Further to that would be to say that the subject does not experience subjectivity or being a subject.

Quoting Janus

What if I said that the viewpoint of the subject is thought, not experienced? The subject perceives (experiences) things from some perspective (viewpoint) but does not experience the viewpoint itself. Further to that would be to say that the subject does not experience subjectivity or being a subject.

I think subjective experience is often conflated with and counted as the experience of subjectivity.

I think we might be talking semantics here. How do you subjectively view the world? I can't know. You do. Go with that. That is your subjective consciousness.

Quoting Philosophim

I think we might be talking semantics here.

I don't think it's merely a matter of semantics. I'm not claiming that you can see the world from my perspective. I'm saying that we don't experience our subjectivity; rather 'subjectivity' is how seeing the world from a perspective is defined, so subjectivity is thought post hoc, not experienced. Thinking that subjectivity is experienced is a kind of reification, and I think the same goes for qualia. This reification of the self as substantive entity is the source of much confusion, Descartes being a notable example.

Does the electric eye that distinguishes frequencies of the spectrum that we perceive with our eyes have the same subjective experience of colors that we have? Does it have a different subjective experience of colors than we have? Is light hitting its sensor, and its circuits distinguishing one frequency from another, a subjective experience?

Quoting Janus

I don't think it's merely a matter of semantics. I'm not claiming that you can see the world from my perspective. I'm saying that we don't experience our subjectivity; rather 'subjectivity' is how seeing the world from a perspective is defined, so subjectivity is thought post hoc, not experienced. Thinking that subjectivity is experienced is a kind of reification, and I think the same goes for qualia. This reification of the self as substantive entity is the source of much confusion, Descartes being a notable example.

I think this is ok. How would you apply this in relation to the OP's point?

Quoting Patterner

Does the electric eye that distinguishes frequencies of the spectrum that we perceive with our eyes have the same subjective experience of colors that we have? Does it have a different subjective experience of colors than we have? Is light hitting its sensor, and its circuits distinguishing one frequency from another, a subjective experience?

The point is we cannot know what it experiences. However, I should make something implicit explicit now. When I speak of the ability to identify this includes the capability to create identity. An electric eye that records and shunts light off to pre-programmed areas isn't conscious. An eye which can observe, then create identify within what it observes (this combination of beams of light represents something new , like a cloud) would be conscious. Of course, conscious of only that.

Quoting Philosophim

I think this is ok. How would you apply this in relation to the OP's point?

I would say that subjective consciousness may not be what we naively or intuitively think it is, and that. maybe (I'd have to think further on this) there is no substantive distinction between objective and subjective consciousness, but that the distinction is an artefact of our dualistic mode of thinking.

Reply to Philosophim
Thanks. I was wondering what Janus meant when saying we don't experience subjectivity. I'm wondering if our experience of perception of the spectrum is different from the electric eye's.

quote="Janus;813294"]I would say that subjective consciousness may not be what we naively or intuitively think it is, and that. maybe (I'd have to think further on this) there is no substantive distinction between objective and subjective consciousness, but that the distinction is an artefact of our dualistic mode of thinking.[/quote]

We agree that there is no substantive difference between the objective and subjective. They are merely different aspects of the same reality. The objective is the reality of another beings consciousness that we can objectively know. The subjective is the reality of the conscious thing from its perspective that no one else can know. One does not negate the other.

Quoting Patterner

I'm wondering if our experience of perception of the spectrum is different from the electric eye's.

Its interesting isn't it? We don't even have to go to the electric eye, we can go to a fly's eyes. Flies have numerous eyes without pupils. This allows them to see the world in a near 360 viewpoint. Birds have eyes on the side of their head and cannot see directly in front of them because of it. How do they process that way of sight? What would it be like to experience that? From a physical standpoint, the experience is most certainly different from ours.

Quoting Philosophim

From a physical standpoint, the experience is most certainly different from ours.

Right. And that's why Nagel choose the bat. Our experiences are different enough that we can't imagine what they experience. But, since we're both mammals, there is a lot more common ground than between us and, say, the fly, so we might feel safer thinking bats [I]do[/I] have subjective experience.

But I'm wondering if, by sayingQuoting Janus

Thinking that subjectivity is experienced is a kind of reification,

Janus means our subjective experience is equivalent to the electric eye's. I'm just not sure what is meant.

Quoting Philosophim

The subjective is the reality of the conscious thing from its perspective that no one else can know. One does not negate the other.

I think we more or less agree, but I would say that both the objective and the subjective are ideas rather than realities from the human perspective.

Quoting Patterner

Right. And that's why Nagel choose the bat. Our experiences are different enough that we can't imagine what they experience. But, since we're both mammals, there is a lot more common ground than between us and, say, the fly, so we might feel safer thinking bats do have subjective experience.

But I'm wondering if, by saying
Thinking that subjectivity is experienced is a kind of reification,
— Janus
Janus means our subjective experience is equivalent to the electric eye's. I'm just not sure what is meant.

What we see may be very different from what the bat sees and closer to what an "electric eye" or camera sees, but that wasn't what I meant. The bat and the camera may be closer in that the bat probably has no idea of its subjective experience. So, I was saying that I see subjective experience, if thought as being distinct from what is experienced, as merely an idea that very easily becomes reified into the notion that qualia are realities over and above what is experienced. To put it another way, I experienced the rain, and I self-reflectively think of myself experiencing the rain; I do not experience myself experiencing the rain.

Inasmuch as I feel, being, as I am, a sensitive organism, I am of course closer to the bat.

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

I appreciate you sharing those links with me: blindsight is, indeed, a very interesting topic. I read through the article and, long story short, I do not think that the author provided a resolution (nor a partial resolution nor a method to providing a resolution) to the hard problem of consciousness. Although the scientific inquiry into how consciousness relates to the brain is most definitely a fascinating subject and fruitful, I did not find anything the author was citing as evidence as proof of consciousness being emergent from brains.

Firstly, blindsight, and many other related disabilities (e.g., blindhearing, blindtaste, etc.), is the dissociation of a person with their qualia and not the absense of qualia. The author even admits this implicitly:

To DB himself, his success in guessing seemed quite unreasonable. So far as he was concerned, he wasn’t the source of his perceptual judgments, his sight had nothing to do with him.
…
One of the most striking facts about human patients with blindsight is that they don’t take ownership of their capacity to see.

Of course, a person who lacks the ability to associate their qualia with themselves is going to say that they aren’t seeing anything when, in fact, they obviously are. This is no different than people who lose all sense of self: they don’t thereby lose their qualitative experience but, rather, their ability to identify it as theirs. I heard a fascinating story of a woman who suffered from complete loss of self; and during childbirth, she kept frantically asking “who’s having the child?”. Does the fact that she can’t associate herself with her own childbirth prove (or even suggest) that she isn’t giving birth to a child? Of course not! Does the fact that someone can’t associate themselves with their own qualitative seeing prove (or even suggest) that they aren’t having it? Of course not! So, right off the bat, I think the author mistakenly thought that neuroscience was proving that qualia is gone with patients suffering from blindsight: no, they still have qualia.

Secondly, I would like to note that I have no problem admitting that brain states and mental states are inextricably linked and, thusly, damage to the brain directly affects the mental activity (and abilities) of a mind. So, I have no problem admitting that it may be possible for a person to lose all sense of self (viz., self-identity), meta-consciousness (i.e., self-knowledge), etc. but as long as they are alive they are having qualitative experience to some degree—even if they don’t recognize it.

Thirdly, throughout the article the author, despite recognizing their work as pertaining to the hard problem, didn’t give any solution to it other than vague notions of evolutionary processes:

Their properties are to be explained, therefore, not literally as the properties of brain-states, but rather as the properties of mind-states dreamed up by the brain.
...
I believe sensations originated as an active behavioural response to sensory stimulation: something the animal did about the stimulus rather than something it felt about it.
…
In short, the animal can begin to get a feel for the stimulus by accessing the information already implicit in its own response. This, I believe, is the precursor of subjective sensation. But, of course, it will not at first be sensation as we humans know it: it will not have any special phenomenal quality.

In short, none of this explainshow mind-independent stuff produces mind. Also, the first sentence (I quoted) doesn’t even make any sense: if qualia are properties of mind-states rather than brain-states, then that means it is irreducible to brain-states—there’s some extra “mind stuff” happening that has those uniquely qualitative properties. If not, then the author still has to provide how the brain-states are producing the so-called “mind-states” that, in turn, produce such properties. I know you don’t like camps, but to summarize here briefly, their argument sounds like a mixture of property dualism and physicalism in a manner that is incapable with eachother. Maybe I misunderstanding something.

The last thing I will comment on (for now) about the article was the 6 criteria of investigating whether an animal is conscious (according to the author), which were:

1. Have a robust sense of self, centred on sensations?
2. Engage in self-pleasuring activities – be it listening to music or masturbation?
3. Have notions of ‘I’ and ‘you’?
4. Carry their sense of their own identity forward?
5. Attribute selfhood to others?
6. Lend out their minds so as to understand others’ feelings?

None of these have anything to do with the hard problem.

I think it is important that we separate two different claims that we have since been mushing together: knowing how qualitative experience is for a being is different than knowing that they have it. So, when you say:

Do I know the exact qualia of someone else getting blacked out? No. But I know my own.

I agree, but I want to clarify some things. Firstly, I don’t see how you can prove that a being is having qualitative experience (under your view)--not just how they are experiencing it themselves. Secondly, the hard problem has nothing to do with either of these two: it is about how something mind-independent produces mind, which is not the same claim as “how a being experiences qualia” or “how one knows that other’s have qualia”: the former doesn’t matter and the latter is a presupposition of the formulation of the problem.

If it is the case that we can use quantitative processes to change our own qualia, then the argument I made stands and you're still holding a contradiction.

Another important clarification I think we need is that knowing that something affects something else does not entail, in itself, that it causes it. You can certainly prove that quantitative processes affect qualia, but not that the former produces the latter: these are two different claims. I have no problem admitting that qualia is affected by quantitative processes; but, I would say, we cannot fully account for all emergent properties of a human being (specifically mental properties) by means of the quantitative processes of the physical properties, whereas we can with a camera + AI. So there’s a symmetry breaker there.

Secondly, I would like to note, although it may be too far beyond the scope of our conversation right now, that I don’t actually hold there are quantities ontologically. Just like how I think the “sun” is a nominal distinction, so is mathematics: it isn’t real. So yeah, I am a mathematical anti-realist: I’m sure we probably disagree on that (; But, the important thing to note is that from the perspective of everything being mind, the camera and all its “quantitative” processes are a steady flow of qualities and our quantifying of those qualities is just an approximate thereof. The reason I was using the “quantitative cannot produce qualities” argument was to keep this friendly to physicalist notions, because a mind-independent world usually entails that reality is fundamentally quantitative and qualities are only emergent with minds.

Where is the evidence of qualia? If I operate on a dog and open up the brain, do I see the image and smell the smells the dog is experiencing? No

We know by abductive argumentation: I have evidence of my qualia, and, on the other “side” of it, I am a physical organism which operates the exact same (just with more superior functionality) to a dog—so the best explanation is that the dog is also qualitatively experiencing. Otherwise, one runs into unparsimonious explanations (e.g., my dog is obviously dreaming right now….but he could be a philosophical zombie that isn’t really dreaming).

You are right that PZs can’t be disprove because they are unfalsifiable; however, they are not the best explanation of organisms around us at all.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Bob

Quoting Bob Ross

I read through the article and, long story short, I do not think that the author provided a resolution (nor a partial resolution nor a method to providing a resolution) to the hard problem of consciousness

My intention was not to address the hard problem of consciousness. From the argument I've presented, you can see there is no hard problem to address.

Quoting Bob Ross

Of course, a person who lacks the ability to associate their qualia with themselves is going to say that they aren’t seeing anything when, in fact, they obviously are. This is no different than people who lose all sense of self: they don’t thereby lose their qualitative experience but, rather, their ability to identify it as theirs.

Isn't this then an example of an objectively conscious being that lacks subjective consciousness? This is actually a limited example of a P-zombie.

I want to ask you what you mean by qualia Bob. Qualia to my knowledge, is almost always identified as the experience one has. Qualia is seeing the color green as only you see it. If someone was not conscious of seeing the color green, most would not mark that as qualia. If you believe qualia does not require consciousness, then what is special about the word qualia at all? At that point, a p-zombie has qualia, they are just not conscious of it. And if that is the case, then my point that subjective consciousness can be separated from objective consciousness stands does it not?

Quoting Bob Ross

I heard a fascinating story of a woman who suffered from complete loss of self; and during childbirth, she kept frantically asking “who’s having the child?”. Does the fact that she can’t associate herself with her own childbirth prove (or even suggest) that she isn’t giving birth to a child? Of course not!

No, but how is that relevant? I'm not claiming that you need subjective consciousness for someone to claim you have objective consciousness. This example once again supports the division I'm noting.

Quoting Bob Ross

Thirdly, throughout the article the author, despite recognizing their work as pertaining to the hard problem, didn’t give any solution to it other than vague notions of evolutionary processes:

Again, I'm not interested in the hard problem, just objective and subjective consciousness.

Although, I'm once again surprised to hear from you that you don't believe qualia comes from brain states. That's the assumed knowledge of science, psychology, and medicine. Its nothing I have to prove, its a given Bob. Can you prove that qualia does not come from brain states? As I mentioned in your last OP, it is not in dispute by anyone within these fields that the mind comes from your brain. I feel analyzing this will assist in the objective subjective separation of consciousness.

Quoting Bob Ross

Do I know the exact qualia of someone else getting blacked out? No. But I know my own.

I agree, but I want to clarify some things. Firstly, I don’t see how you can prove that a being is having qualitative experience (under your view)--not just how they are experiencing it themselves.

We can't under my view. We can believe them. We can observe the objective conscious actions they take and assume they must be experiencing qualia. But no, we can't prove. It is always at best an inductive reason, never deduced knowledge.

Quoting Bob Ross

Another important clarification I think we need is that knowing that something affects something else does not entail, in itself, that it causes it.

To clarify, we can't say its the entire cause. When something affects another, that result of that affectation is part of the chain of causality.

Quoting Bob Ross

You can certainly prove that quantitative processes affect qualia, but not that the former produces the latter: these are two different claims.

Agreed. But we can certainly say that it has an influence in producing mind, therefore is part of the cause of qualia. To claim that there is something else besides brain states would require an example of something besides a brain state affecting qualia. Do you have an example? For example, if I drop a penny, it falls because of gravity. But the penny wobbles in a state that we cannot attribute to gravity alone. Air resistance also affects the fall of the penny. Thus the speed of something dropping is determined not only by gravity, but by any resistance against gravity as well. In what way does the brain have a qualitative state that cannot be explained by the brain alone? Do you have any example of something else besides the brain which would affect the mind?

Quoting Bob Ross

We know by abductive argumentation: I have evidence of my qualia, and, on the other “side” of it, I am a physical organism which operates the exact same (just with more superior functionality) to a dog—so the best explanation is that the dog is also qualitatively experiencing.

Yes, this is an induction. This is something we cannot deduce, or actually know. That is why such discussions would be under subjective consciousness, while objective consciousness would not concern itself with something that does not have objective certainty.

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

My intention was not to address the hard problem of consciousness. From the argument I've presented, you can see there is no hard problem to address.

I thought you were arguing that minds emerge from brains? Am I misunderstanding you? Or you are saying that the objective vs. subjective consciousness distinction is the out of scope of that claim?

If so, then I think it is very relevant to your claim implicitly because your distinction is predicated, as far as I am understanding, on an outlook that the mind is emergent from the brain. For example, to say that a camera + AI has qualia only makes sense if you are implicitly claiming that consciousness arises out of mechanical (i.e., quantitative) processes which immediately invokes the hard problem.

The reason I explicitly brought it up was because that was what the article you sent was talking about; sorry, I must have misunderstood what you were trying to cite by that article.

I want to ask you what you mean by qualia Bob.

Let me layout how I use the terms in their most generic sense:

Consciousness : qualitative experience.
Qualia: instances of qualitative experience (e.g., seeing a car, feeling a pillow, tasting an apple, etc.).
Meta-consciousness: self-knowledge: ability to acquire knowledge of one’s consciousness (e.g., I not only taste the apple, but I am aware of my tasting of the apple: I can gain knowledge of my own qualitative experience).

These terms are not compatible with your terms, so let me try to cross-reference:

Your use of consciousness is broader than mine, and I think my fits in your “subjective consciousness” category; but to me, you seem to also use my term sometimes to refer to “objective consciousness” as well, or at least I am confused as to whether you think that “objectively conscious” beings have qualitative experience or not? That’s all I mean by consciousness: observation and awareness are not synonymous with consciousness to me—I have found that it just muddies the waters when discussing the hard problem (which I know you are saying you aren’t trying to discuss here, but it is inevitably pertinent hereto).

Isn't this then an example of an objectively conscious being that lacks subjective consciousness? This is actually a limited example of a P-zombie.

No it is not a P-Zombie. Like I said before: there is a difference between not having subjective (qualitative) experience and being unable to identify it. I would argue that the blindsight person is still qualitatively seeing, they just don’t identify themselves as seeing. This could be because they simply don’t think they are having the qualitative experience (like the woman giving childbirth asking “who having this child?”) or that they have lost meta-consciousness when it comes to seeing (just like how some lower life forms have qualitative experience but they are unaware that they have it). A P-Zombie is a being with no qualitative experience, and I am not seeing why blindsight would be an example of such a being.

Qualia to my knowledge, is almost always identified as the experience one has. Qualia is seeing the color green as only you see it.

Correct: qualia is the instances of qualitative experience we have, which doesn’t necessarily mean per se that you see a different color green than I do.

If you believe qualia does not require consciousness

I do believe that qualia requires consciousness, but you refer to things that aren’t qualitatively experiencing as conscious; so under your terms, yes, I do think you are arguing that there could be a being which doesn’t have qualitative experience (or at least we don’t know if they do) but yet we can decipher that they are observing, identifying, and acting upon their environment (which meets your definition of consciousness). Within my terminology one has to be qualitatively experiencing (to some degree) to be conscious: it’s your view that your critique here applies I would say (i.e., If you believe qualia does not require qualitative experience, then what is special about the word qualia at all?). For you, you can cogently claim within your terms that one can be conscious without qualia.

At that point, a p-zombie has qualia, they are just not conscious of it. And if that is the case, then my point that subjective consciousness can be separated from objective consciousness stands does it not?

Again, I hold that P-Zombie are being which observe, identify, and act (to use your terms: conscious) but do not have qualitative experience (consciousness in my terms).

No, but how is that relevant? I'm not claiming that you need subjective consciousness for someone to claim you have objective consciousness. This example once again supports the division I'm noting.

But your division is just a broader definition of consciousness than what is typically used: non-qualitatively observing beings are not standardly included in the definition of consciousness.

As far as I am understanding your terms, there can be objectively conscious beings that are not subjectively conscious, and the former entails nothing about the latter. This entails two important things:

1. There is no bridge between the two, so I don’t think you can claim by abduction with criteria from objective consciousness (i.e., observing, acting, and identifying) that someone is subjectively conscious—and this is just the definition of epistemic solipsism.

2. The terms are perfectly cogent, as laid out, because it just includes more than I would be willing to semantically associate with “consciousness”. I would argue it is leading and will lead to confusions. For example, a philosophical zombie, when they say it isn’t conscious, they are not referring to your “objective consciousness”--so it would incorrect to think that a merely objectively conscious being is “conscious” for intents of the PZ debate. Consciousness is qualitative experience.

Although, I'm once again surprised to hear from you that you don't believe qualia comes from brain states. That's the assumed knowledge of science, psychology, and medicine. Its nothing I have to prove, its a given Bob.

I don’t know why you would say that it is given: that sounds awfully dogmatic. I figured you would have a proof for it, are you saying you just assume that is the case? Am I understanding you correctly?

Moreover, when you say it is assumed knowledge of science (and the other disciplines similar thereto) I think you are wrong and right—it doesn’t entail what you are implying. There’s a difference between scientific consensus and scientists having a consensus: the former is a consensus within a subject within the field of science, and the latter is merely a consensus amongst people who also have the professional of doing science. This is important to distinguish; for example, I think it is safe to say that most scientists are atheists, but I would be wrong to claim that “there is a scientific consensus that God doesn’t exist”--rather, it is really that “there is a consensus amongst scientists that God doesn’t exist”. Likewise, I could, with some truth, claim that “it is assumed that God doesn’t exist in science”. But whether God exists is not a scientific question but, rather, a theological one. Likewise, whether the brain produces consciousness is widely recognized as a matter of philosophy of mind which is metaphysics and not science. Yes, most scientists are physicalists, but that isn’t a scientific consensus—that’s scientists having a consensus.

Can you prove that qualia does not come from brain states? As I mentioned in your last OP, it is not in dispute by anyone within these fields that the mind comes from your brain

Firstly, yes it absolutely is disputed: not every scientist is a physicalist. Secondly, science doesn’t tell us whether the brain produces consciousness.

Thirdly, no I cannot prove that qualia cannot come from brain states but, rather, I can prove that methodological naturalism (which is the same method as science) cannot account for consciousness as brain states. There’s no proof that consciousness is produced by the brain, and so, within metaphysics, it becomes a question of what has the most explanatory power (in terms of explaining the world we experience) while minimizing complexity (of the explanation). Physicalism is less parsimonious than idealism. It’s not about proving it impossible; if that was the case then I should hold that unicorns exist on the other side of the galaxy, that there is an invisible cookie monster that watches me sleep, that there is a teacup floating around saturn, that everything is within my mind, etc.

We can't under my view. We can believe them. We can observe the objective conscious actions they take and assume they must be experiencing qualia

To clarify though, you are saying that determining someone is objectively conscious does not entail that they have qualia, correct?

To clarify, we can't say its the entire cause. When something affects another, that result of that affectation is part of the chain of causality.

I was getting at that correlation is different than causation. When we determine something causes something else, we provide proof in the form of empirical observations and conceptual explanations. We don’t just say: this impact that, so this caused that if we can’t conceptually explain what is actually happening.

But we can certainly say that it has an influence in producing mind, therefore is part of the cause of qualia

I disagree. We can say that consciousness is impacted by brain states which doesn’t entail, in itself, that the brain is influencing the production of the mind.

To claim that there is something else besides brain states would require an example of something besides a brain state affecting qualia.

No it wouldn’t. The claim is that “something else is producing qualia” only has to rely on the fact that the something in question isn’t regarded as producing it. We can’t claim that we know brain states are producing it, so we venture out by claiming “something else might be producing it”. Then, we examine what is the best explanation for the mind-body problem: I would argue it is the exact reverse of what you are claiming: the physical is weakly emergent from the mental, not vice-versa. The reason there’s such a strong correlation is because the physical are representations and at rock bottom it is minds “interacting” with minds so to speak. We have direct, introspective knowledge of ideas being manifested within the physical, whereas we have no knowledge of the physical producing the mental. I think it is more parsimonious to hold consciousness as fundamental.

In what way does the brain have a qualitative state that cannot be explained by the brain alone?

All of it: science doesn’t provide any conceptual explanation of how any mental state is produced by any brain state.

Do you have any example of something else besides the brain which would affect the mind?

I don’t claim that there is something else besides mind, some other third substance, that producing mind but, rather, that mind is fundamental. Mind is affecting mind: ontologically there are ideas in a mind. In schopenhaurian terms: the world is will and representation.

Bob

Quoting Bob Ross

Like I said before: there is a difference between not having subjective (qualitative) experience and being unable to identify it. I would argue that the blindsight person is still qualitatively seeing, they just don’t identify themselves as seeing.

A robot, just like the person who suffers from visual agnosia can see and respond to what they are seeing, but do not have the self-reflective awareness of seeing. The way I interpret this is that both lack subjective experience (of seeing). To put it another way, both the robot and the blindsight person do not know that they can see.

If a person suffered agnosia in regard to all their senses, including proprioception and interoception, it would seem hard to say how they would differ from a robot that had functional equivalents of all the human senses, that is a robot that could respond to tastes, smells, tactile feels, sounds, and sights, as well as proprioceptive and interoceptive data.

Quoting Bob Ross

I thought you were arguing that minds emerge from brains? Am I misunderstanding you? Or you are saying that the objective vs. subjective consciousness distinction is the out of scope of that claim?

I'm not really arguing for it. Its just what is considered fact at this time. If you want to prove that minds do not come from the brain feel free, but you'll need to challenge modern day neuroscience, psychology, and medicine.

As for the hard problem, I still think you misunderstand it. " Explaining why consciousness occurs at all can be contrasted with so-called “easy problems” of consciousness: the problems of explaining the function, dynamics, and structure of consciousness. These features can be explained using the usual methods of science. But that leaves the question of why there is something it is like for the subject when these functions, dynamics, and structures are present. This is the hard problem." -Internet Encyclopedia of philosophy
https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/#:~:text=The%20hard%20problem%20of%20consciousness%20is%20the%20problem%20of%20explaining,directly%20appear%20to%20the%20subject.

The hard problem even admits that consciousness is explained through the brain. The question is how does consciousness explicitly form from that process, and can we scientifically demonstrate what it is like to be that conscious being. Essentially consciousness is personal to the brain, it is not something we can observe from the outside.

"This indicates that a physical explanation of consciousness is fundamentally incomplete: it leaves out what it is like to be the subject, for the subject. There seems to be an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the physical world and consciousness. All these factors make the hard problem hard."

My solution to this is to just simply note that referring to the experience of the conscious subject itself is "subjective consciousness". Knowing what it is like to be the subject of any one conscious being besides ourselves is currently impossible.

Quoting Bob Ross

I don’t know why you would say that it is given: that sounds awfully dogmatic. I figured you would have a proof for it, are you saying you just assume that is the case? Am I understanding you correctly?

The only people questioning that mind comes from the brain are philosophers. To my knowledge, every other factual aspect of the world knows that the mind comes from the brain. The hard problem does Mind coming from the brain is like oxygen theory, while the idea it does not is like phlogiston theory. Oxygen theory does not have to prove itself, phlogiston theory does at this point in time. I am open to hearing arguments that the mind does not come from the brain, but I don't feel the need to prove the scientific default. The discussion I'm trying to hold is more equivalent to the science of launching a rocket. Having to pivot to prove that mind comes from the brain is like then debating that fuel and oxygen is what causes the rocket combustion instead of phlogiston leakage.

It may be a large enough subject to address elsewhere. I can hop back into your original thread when it dies down if you would like! But feel free to prove here first that the mind does not come from the brain and lets see where that takes us.

Quoting Bob Ross

Likewise, whether the brain produces consciousness is widely recognized as a matter of philosophy of mind which is metaphysics and not science. Yes, most scientists are physicalists, but that isn’t a scientific consensus—that’s scientists having a consensus.

While this is an interesting thought, is this something you can demonstrate? How do you explain modern day neuroscience? Medical Psychiatry? Brain surgery?

Quoting Bob Ross

Firstly, yes it absolutely is disputed: not every scientist is a physicalist. Secondly, science doesn’t tell us whether the brain produces consciousness.

First, like you noted, just because you're an atheist scientist, it doesn't mean that science concludes atheism. What is the currently agreed upon consensus in science? Finding a few here and there who disagree is easy to find; 1-10 dentists don't believe that brushing your teeth helps prevent tooth decay for example.

Second, the easy problem confirms that yes, science knows that the brain produces consciousness. Please find me a reputable neuroscience paper that shows that the brain most certainly does not produce consciousness, and then also provides evidence of what is.

Here are a few interesting videos to check out. This is from 11 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FsH7RK1S2E

This is from five years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecvv-EvOj8M (Start at 6:00)

Finally, just as an aside, how do you explain the mind seeing? The eyes connect through the optic nerve straight to your brain. It has no where else to go.

Quoting Bob Ross

Consciousness : qualitative experience.
Qualia: instances of qualitative experience (e.g., seeing a car, feeling a pillow, tasting an apple, etc.).
Meta-consciousness: self-knowledge: ability to acquire knowledge of one’s consciousness (e.g., I not only taste the apple, but I am aware of my tasting of the apple: I can gain knowledge of my own qualitative experience).

This would seem to me that meta-consciousness is "qualitative experience of qualitative experience". In which case, is this a useful term? At the least, I don't see how it counters my point about Blindsight. The person does not have any qualia, or consciousness, of seeing what is in front of their eyes.

Lets bring it out of blindsight for a minute. Right now are you conscious of everything your senses are processing right now? Aren't there smells, sounds, and even sights in the corner of your eyes, that you are not conscious of? Isn't it the attention to these, the conscious experience of them, that is qualia? I suppose I'm looking for a separation between the meaning of qualia and perception or senses. Generally I've understood qualia to be that conscious experience of sensations or perceptions, not the mere flooding of light or sound into one's body.

Back to blindsight, it seems much like the inability to give a conscious focus to what one is perceiving. Which seems to me to be something that the person does not subjectively experience, even though the objective observation of their actions implies that they do. Here they are accurately assessing where something is, actively looking at it, then claiming they do not see it. Can you explain how your definitions counter this?

Quoting Bob Ross

I do believe that qualia requires consciousness, but you refer to things that aren’t qualitatively experiencing as conscious; so under your terms, yes, I do think you are arguing that there could be a being which doesn’t have qualitative experience (or at least we don’t know if they do) but yet we can decipher that they are observing, identifying, and acting upon their environment (which meets your definition of consciousness).

Let me clarify what I'm stating. Qualia is the subjective experience of the thing which is observed to be objectively conscious. Qualia is not necessary for us to conclude something is objectively conscious. The reason for this, is we cannot objectively assess qualia. We cannot prove what a conscious being is experiencing, or not experiencing at a subjective level. Therefore we do not consider it objectively, but can only consider it from their subjective viewpoint.

Blindsight is a clear example that a person can have an objective consciousness about something, but not have any subjective consciousness, or personal experience of seeing the object needed to make the correct conscious decision.

This is getting too long, and I think the above has addressed most of your points. One more!
Quoting Bob Ross

I don’t claim that there is something else besides mind, some other third substance, that producing mind but, rather, that mind is fundamental. Mind is affecting mind: ontologically there are ideas in a mind.

How is this any different from magic then Bob? Even if you could get such a model to work, which I don't want to go into all the potential problems at this time, what would you hope to get out of it? How would this be useful to humanity?

Thank you again Bob for your clear and deep thoughts on the subject!

Quoting Philosophim

I'm not really arguing for it. Its just what is considered fact at this time. If you want to prove that minds do not come from the brain feel free, but you'll need to challenge modern day neuroscience, psychology, and medicine.

Microbial colonies exhibit an awareness of and adaptation to their environment (eg. The Global Brain by Howard Bloom). Which demonstrates the most fundamental aspects of consciousness, perception and action. So the requirement isn't so much a "brain" as some form of physical medium. Ascribing consciousness to a brain is just anthropocentric prejudice. In which case, there is literally no limit to what could potentially instantiate a consciousness. Any kind of quantum-coherent system, for example. So if you want to argue for brain-dependence, it should be qualified as "human consciousness." If you are additionally claiming that human consciousness is the only kind of consciousness, I just offered a counter-example.

Quoting Pantagruel

Microbial colonies exhibit an awareness of and adaptation to their environment (eg. The Global Brain by Howard Bloom). Which demonstrates the most fundamental aspects of consciousness, perception and action. So the requirement isn't so much a "brain" as some form of physical medium. Ascribing consciousness to a brain is just anthropocentric prejudice. In which case, there is literally no limit to what could potentially instantiate a consciousness

Yes, you misunderstand. I've expressed in the OP that consciousness is not limited to humans, and have noted that consciousness could exist in plants, and even AI elsewhere. In long form conversations that take time to write out, its much easier to rely on the context of the conversation. In the full context of Bob's conversation, I think its clear we're talking about human minds and human brains.

Reply to Philosophim
Ok. And you do note in your OP that one of the problems with the term consciousness is that it is "too generic." I'm not sure whether that is a problem or a feature. If you want to stipulate that when you use the term consciousness you are restricting that to mean "human consciousness" only that's your prerogative.

However, in that case, your statement, that minds emerge from brains " Its just what is considered fact at this time" is really either tautological or out of scope of your assumption. Human minds emerge from human brains. Minds, in general, perhaps do not necessarily.

Quoting Pantagruel

However, in that case, your statement, that minds emerge from brains " Its just what is considered fact at this time" is really either tautological or out of scope of your assumption.

I've already clarified that your statement taken out of context was a misread. If you would like to contribute, start from the OP and take the definitions as given there. Here is a relevant paragraph for you.

Quoting Philosophim

Why the need for the separation?

The simple answer is because a subjective experience cannot be observed by someone who is not that subject. We can infer and believe that another being experiences a subjective consciousness, but it is beyond our knowledge of experience. Yet objective consciousness is clearly within the realm of experienced knowledge. This lets us also apply consciousness beyond humanity. We can examine other animals for objective consciousness, as well as plants and perhaps even things we may not consider life. Objective consciousness doesn't have to know what its like to be the subject within that consciousness, or even if there's something that we as humans would recognize as a subject at all.

Reply to Philosophim Isn't this whole idea of "objective consciousness" misleading? Aren't you just describing the external observation of consciousness?

Quoting Pantagruel

Isn't this whole idea of "objective consciousness" misleading? Aren't you just describing the external observation of consciousness?

Mislead is a pretty bold accusation. Please point out where and how I'm misleading the reader if you're going to do so.

Reply to Philosophim As I said, the idea "objective consciousness" yokes together terms which are normally exclusive (consciousness is by definition subjective) in an equivocating fashion. You are describing either an object-consciousness (if it is the consciousness doing the observing of the other consciousness, ie. consciousness of consciousness as an object) or a conscious-object (if you are describing the observed consciousness qua observed by the other).

Reply to Pantagruel
Pantagruel, you've pulled statements out of context, accused me of misleading, and apparently have not read the OP, or simply lack reading comprehension. I clearly defined what objective consciousness is in the OP. This is philosophy, the term and its definition is a proposal to be debated on that I did NOT mislead people about. I do not mind answering questions, clarifying issues, or addressing relevant critiques. I'm not interested in discussing with someone who is not making good faith efforts to address and understand the OP.

Quoting Philosophim

I'm not interested in discussing with someone who is not making good faith efforts to address and understand the OP.

No, I'm going straight from your OP.

"Objective consciousness occurs when we can know that something that is not our subjective consciousness is also observing and identifying. The problem in knowing whether something is objectively conscious is that we cannot experience their subjective consciousness."

and

"On the other end, objective consciousness shouldn't try to ascertain that it can know what subjective consciousness is like."

You clearly say that objective consciousness occurs in the observing subject as a function of the awareness of another conscious being. Which is fine. Except you then also ascribe the property of being "objectively conscious" to theobserved being (see italicized in the above quote). Not only that, you then go on to ascribe an additional intentionality to objective consciousness (which is nothing more or less than specifically awareness of another consciousness by your own definitions) when you suggest that it "shouldn't try to ascertain" that it can know what subjective consciousness is like. Is it a mode of consciousness? Is it a specific instance of consciousness of something?

Ok, yes, when I see something which I believe to be conscious, I am conscious of an object that I deem to be conscious. You are absolutely correct. And I don't experience the contents of other minds. For sure.

Quoting Philosophim

Objective consciousness then requires the addition of one other term, "Action". Only through a thing's actions can we ascertain that it can observe and identify.

Ok, this is better Pantagruel.

You left out the next few sentences in the quote, which are important. You need to read more than a few sentences before making judgements. Sentences are part of an overall idea right? Don't read the sentences in isolation. Read the sentences to understand the idea.

Quoting Philosophim

Objective consciousness occurs when we can know that something that is not our subjective consciousness is also observing and identifying. The problem in knowing whether something is objectively conscious is that we cannot experience their subjective consciousness. [i]So the only logical thing to do is to observe what an objective consciousness does that only an observing identifying thing could do.
"Objective consciousness then requires the addition of one other term, "Action". Only through a thing's actions can we ascertain that it can observe and identify."
[/i]

Objective consciousness is not subjective consciousness. Objective consciousness is the observation and logical conclusion that the other being is observing and identifying things through their actions.
Subjective consciousness is the direct subjective experience of being conscious.

Quoting Pantagruel

You clearly say that objective consciousness occurs in the observing subject as a function of the awareness of another conscious being.

I want to break down your words here to make sure I understand. You use the word "occurs in" with regards to objective consciousness. Objective consciousness is observed and known by the observing a subjects actions. It does not assess the inner experience of the subject. It does not assess the inner experience of the self. So its a little odd to say objective consciousness occurs in something. Objective consciousness is an observation of consciousness that does not require understanding the inner subjectivity of that consciousness.

So I am not ascribing any inner experience of consciousness when I am describing objective consciousness.

Quoting Pantagruel

Ok, yes, when I see something which I believe to be conscious, I am conscious of an object that I deem to be conscious. You are absolutely correct. And I don't experience the contents of other minds. For sure.

To simplify this further:

When I see something that I believe to be conscious, I study its actions. If the actions of the being are actions that can only be done by something which can observe and identify, then objectively, it is conscious.

My own experience of being conscious, is subjective consciousness. My experience is only within my knowledge, no one else can know exactly what I am experiencing. I of course know what its like to be conscious from my point of view. But just like no one else can know what its like to be conscious from my point of view, I cannot know what its like for someone else to be conscious from their point of view.

Because subjective consciousness cannot be known by anyone besides the subject, it should be in a separate category than objective consciousness, which can be known and studied by everyone.

Quoting Philosophim

Objective consciousness is not subjective consciousness. Objective consciousness is the observation and logical conclusion that the other being is observing a

If it is an observation and a logical conclusion then it is subjective consciousness. These are both elements of subjective consciousness.

Quoting Philosophim

So I am not ascribing any inner experience of consciousness when I am describing objective consciousness.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned, you say objective consciousness should not "try to ascertain that it can know." Ascertaining and knowing are also operations of subjective consciousness.

It's a meaningless characterization.

Quoting Pantagruel

If it is an observation and a logical conclusion then it is subjective consciousness. These are both elements of subjective consciousness.

Correct. Meaning that if you are observing and identifying, that experience you are having of observing and identifying is your subjective consciousness.

Quoting Pantagruel

So I am not ascribing any inner experience of consciousness when I am describing objective consciousness.
— Philosophim

Nevertheless, as I mentioned, you say objective consciousness should not "try to ascertain that it can know." Ascertaining and knowing are also operations of subjective consciousness.

Please finish what I claimed.

"should not try to ascertain that it can know what another subjective consciousness is like"

You agreed with me on this. You cannot know what it is like for another being to be conscious. You cannot know another beings subjective consciousness. You can of course know your own subjective consciousness. But because I can never know your subjective consciousness, I cannot make any claims to the experience of your subjective consciousness objectively. I can't know what its like when you see green. You can't know what its like that I see green. We can objectively know that we both see the wavelength we call green. But we cannot objectively know what the subjective experience of seeing green is like.

Quoting Philosophim

Correct. Meaning that if you are observing and identifying, that experience you are having of observing and identifying is your subjective consciousness.

Except that you keep saying objective consciousness is not conscious. Ascribing these properties to objective consciousness contradicts this. Your demarcation isn't working.

Quoting Philosophim

You agreed with me on this. You cannot know what it is like for another being to be conscious. You cannot know another beings subjective consciousness. You can of course know your own subjective consciousness. But because I can never know your subjective consciousness, I cannot make any claims to the experience of your subjective consciousness objectively. I can't know what its like when you see green. You can't know what its like that I see green. We can objectively know that we both see the wavelength we call green. But we cannot objectively know what the subjective experience of seeing green is like.

And even if I just ignore the self-contradictions of "objective consciousness," there are senses in which we are co-conscious. Mirror-neurons function through identification with the observed cognitive state of others in certain circumstances. Empathy is a co-awareness of the subjective plight of another. And it is a critical developmental stage in conscious development.

Quoting Pantagruel

Except that you keep saying objective consciousness is not conscious. Ascribing these properties to objective consciousness contradicts this.

I don't say that at all. The statement doesn't even make any sense. Please re-read the definition of objective consciousness, subjective consciousness and my explanations. Pull some quotes demonstrating where I've said this, as I don't understand how you're drawing that conclusion. I can't attempt to clarify for you until you give me my exact words that back your claim.

Quoting Pantagruel

And even if I just ignore the self-contradictions of "objective consciousness,"

Please point out these self-contradictions. And quote me. At this point it is safe to say you have trouble reading and understanding the OP. This could be due to the lack of clarity in my terms or arguments. But I cannot know this if you do not cite.

Quoting Pantagruel

there are senses in which we are co-conscious. Mirror-neurons function through identification with the observed cognitive state of others in certain circumstances. Empathy is a co-awareness of the subjective plight of another. And it is a critical developmental stage in conscious development.

This has nothing to do with the definitions or topic here. Lets ensure that you first understand the definitions and arguments being made before you try adding new definitions like co-conscious.

"Objective consciousness is the observation and logical conclusion that the other being is observing"

Objective consciousness is logical conclusion. How can it not be conscious? Logical conclusions don't think themselves.

In fact, you even talk explicitly about "an objectively conscious being."

"Isn't this then an example of an objectively conscious being that lacks subjective consciousness?"

It's unsinn. If the objectively conscious being is making observations and logical conclusions then it is conscious. The entire point of a p-zombie is that it is not-conscious. Calling it "objectively conscious" has no meaning.

Quoting Pantagruel

"Objective consciousness is the observation and logical conclusion that the other being is observing"

Objective consciousness is logical conclusion. How can it not be conscious? Logical conclusions don't think themselves.

First, you cut off the rest of the quote which includes identification, and action. Second, your grammar is starting to fail. "is logical conclusion" "logical conclusions don't think themselves". This shows me you're not thinking about things, but putting out sloppy and quick replies.

I had to do a German translation for Unsinn. Why? I'm not German. And finally your point about the p-zombie shows me, again, that you have no idea what the definitions are that I've clearly described in the OP and in follow ups.

I've been more than patient, but its clear you're not taking this discussion seriously. Have a good day Pantagruel, we'll try again another time.

Reply to Janus

Hello Janus,

A robot, just like the person who suffers from visual agnosia can see and respond to what they are seeing, but do not have the self-reflective awareness of seeing.

I would argue that they do not “see” in the same manner (i.e., one is qualitatively seeing while the other is just quantitatively processing its environment), so I think you are equivocating when using the term “seeing” in this sentence to refer to both.

The way I interpret this is that both lack subjective experience (of seeing). To put it another way, both the robot and the blindsight person do not know that they can see.

I think it makes more sense, given that blindsight only demonstrates a disassociation with one’s experience, that the person simply isn’t meta-conscious of or perhaps able to identify with their qualitative experience.

If a person suffered agnosia in regard to all their senses, including proprioception and interoception, it would seem hard to say how they would differ from a robot that had functional equivalents of all the human senses, that is a robot that could respond to tastes, smells, tactile feels, sounds, and sights, as well as proprioceptive and interoceptive data.

As far as I understand, ‘agnosia’ is when one fails, despite having adequate senses, to process those senses; so a robot that can process senses would actually have more capability to navigate its environment than the human with agnosia. However, the human would still be qualitatively experiencing, they just fail to process that qualitative experience correctly. Part of qualitative experience, for normal people, is much more than what is required to have baseline ‘qualitative experience’ to me.

Bob

Quoting Bob Ross

I would argue that they do not “see” in the same manner (i.e., one is qualitatively seeing while the other is just quantitatively processing its environment), so I think you are equivocating when using the term “seeing” in this sentence to refer to both.

I would argue that if there is no awareness of seeing that it makes no sense to speak of qualitative seeing.

Quoting Bob Ross

I think it makes more sense, given that blindsight only demonstrates a disassociation with one’s experience, that the person simply isn’t meta-conscious of or perhaps able to identify with their qualitative experience.

Again I would say that being disassocited from experience is the same as having no (qualitative) experience. Quality is a judgement which is all in the conscious modelling.

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

I'm not really arguing for it. Its just what is considered fact at this time. If you want to prove that minds do not come from the brain feel free, but you'll need to challenge modern day neuroscience, psychology, and medicine.

The point is that I don’t. It is not a scientific fact that brains produce consciousness. It is a scientific theory, but scientific theories are either more facts (i.e., explaining the how in terms of another how) or metaphysical commitments. In the case of physicalism, which is the term for the claim you are making, is a metaphysical commitment that most scientists agree with. That’s not the same thing as science proving the brain produces consciousness.

As for the hard problem, I still think you misunderstand it. " Explaining why consciousness occurs at all can be contrasted with so-called “easy problems” of consciousness: the problems of explaining the function, dynamics, and structure of consciousness. These features can be explained using the usual methods of science. But that leaves the question of why there is something it is like for the subject when these functions, dynamics, and structures are present. This is the hard problem." -Internet Encyclopedia of philosophy

I partially agree with you here because “consciousness” and “something it is like to for the subject” are being used ambiguously there. This is why I always note a distinction, when discussing the hard problem, between awareness and experience: the former being “how a being has knowledge, be aware, of its environment” while the latter is “how a being has qualitative, subjective experience of its environment”. All problems pertaining to ‘awareness’ are easy problems for physicalism: the hard problem pertains to everything about ‘experience’. Explaining functions, for example, is an easy problem—e.g., a being can know that something is green by interpreting the wavelength of light reflected off of the object. However, explaining how those functions produce experience is a different story—e.g., why does the being also have a qualitative experience of the greeness of the object?

My distinction is pretty standard and honestly I think your link just explains it more ambiguously. For example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness:

The hard problem of consciousness asks why and how humans have qualia[note 1] or phenomenal experiences.[2] This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give humans and other animals the ability to discriminate, integrate information, and so forth

I really like this post about it: https://consc.net/papers/facing.html . Section two really explains the distinction well (to me at least).

The hard problem even admits that consciousness is explained through the brain

I think you may be misunderstanding. Yes, the hard problem presumes, in order to even be a problem in the first place, that one is trying to explain consciousness by the standard reductive naturalist methodological approach. However, this is not the same thing as it being true. The hard problem is only such for physicalism, not other accounts such as substance dualism and idealism.

My solution to this is to just simply note that referring to the experience of the conscious subject itself is "subjective consciousness". Knowing what it is like to be the subject of any one conscious being besides ourselves is currently impossible.

This isn’t a solution, it is semantic distinction between what we can know (i.e., that beings can interpret their environment and observe it) and what we can’t (i.e., that they are conscious in the qualitative sense). To me, you are admitting that we can’t know people are conscious in the sense of the term that matters for the hard problem: the hard problem isn’t pertinent to beings that merely observe, act, and identify—those are soft problems for physicalism.

The only people questioning that mind comes from the brain are philosophers.

I generally agree and would say that this is due to the fact that mainly only philosophers are brushed up in philosophy of mind and, consequently, realize that we, at the very least, have no clue what consciousness is (and of course others try to give accounts of it). Most scientists aren’t engaged in philosophy which, like I said before, is the proper subject for this matter (i.e., metaphysics); instead, they metaphysically commit themselves to physicalism (most of the time) without every explicitly engaging in metaphysics themselves.

The hard problem does Mind coming from the brain is like oxygen theory, while the idea it does not is like phlogiston theory

I don’t see how this analogy holds. The scientific theory that brain produces mind is purely metaphysics.

But feel free to prove here first that the mind does not come from the brain and lets see where that takes us

Again, I am not claiming that the mind does not come from the brain but, rather, that we cannot prove (even theoretically in the future) because reductive physicalism affords no such answers—the methodology fails in this regard. I can prove that much, and that is all I need to prove to claim that you are not warranted in claiming that the mind comes from the brain.

To keep it short, my proof is the examination of the form, absracted, of what methodological reductive naturalism (physicalism) can afford with regards to consciousness. The form is as follows: “consciousness is [set of biological functions] because [set of biological functions] impacts consciousness [in this set of manners]”. That is the form of argumentation that a reductive naturalist methodology can afford and, upon close examination, there is a conceptual gap between consciousness being impacted in said manners and the set of biological functions (responsible for such impact) producing consciousness. The best reductive naturalism can do is provide better insight into how the brain affects the mind (i.e., “this [set of conscious states] is impacted by this [set of biological functions] in this [set of manners]”), but this doesn’t afford any conceptual explanation of how the conscious states are allegedly produced by the brain states. Once one understands that, one immediately likewise apprehends that science can afford no answer either because it is predicated on the reductive naturalist methodology.

That would be my shortened argument.

Likewise, whether the brain produces consciousness is widely recognized as a matter of philosophy of mind which is metaphysics and not science. Yes, most scientists are physicalists, but that isn’t a scientific consensus—that’s scientists having a consensus. — Bob Ross

While this is an interesting thought, is this something you can demonstrate?

Taking into consideration the abbreviated argument above, it becomes clear that science cannot afford an answer and consequently the answer to the claim goes beyond the possibility of all experience which, to me, is the definition of metaphysics.

How do you explain modern day neuroscience? Medical Psychiatry? Brain surgery?

From an ontological agnostic’s perspective, those fields are getting much better at understanding the relation between brain states and mental states but they say nothing about what consciousness fundamentally is.

From an Analytic Idealist’s perspective, the strong correlation between mental and brain states is because the brain, along with everything else that is physical in a colloquial sense of the term (i.e., tangible, solid, has shape, etc.), is a extrinsic representation of the mental. I see the color green and the highest level extrinsic representation of that, when examining my brain with a scanner, is the neural activity we see within our perceptions--our representations of the world around is. Think of it like the video game analogy: if a character, Rose, hooks up another character, Billy, to a brain scanner and observes Billy qualitatively experiencing a green tree, she would be factually wrong to conclude that the Billy’s brain states were causing his mental experience of it because, in fact, the tree and his brain and body are fundamentally representations of 0s and 1s in a computer. We conflate our dashboard of experience with what reality fundamentally is—mentality.

Rose wouldn’t be wrong in noting that any scientific inquiry she could do on brain states and mental states (of billy) will be useful and will help them gain better knowledge to navigate the territory—but it says nothing about the itself.

Second, the easy problem confirms that yes, science knows that the brain produces consciousness.

What easy problem confirms that?

Please find me a reputable neuroscience paper that shows that the brain most certainly does not produce consciousness, and then also provides evidence of what is.

If I could, then I would be proving myself wrong. The point is that science doesn’t afford an answer, so it would be contradictory of me to provide you with a scientific explanation, which is a reductive naturalistic approach, to afford an answer.

Finally, just as an aside, how do you explain the mind seeing? The eyes connect through the optic nerve straight to your brain. It has no where else to go.

I would say, in summary, that the extrinsic representation of qualitatively seeing a world, from the side of another being that is qualitatively seeing, is light entering the physical eyes and brain interpreting it—but this is just the representation of it on our dashboard of experience. Under Analytic Idealism, the information is accurate (enough to survive at least), but the way it is represented is not fundamentally how it (ontologically) exists (like the tree in a video game).

This would seem to me that meta-consciousness is "qualitative experience of qualitative experience".

Not quite. Meta-consciousness is the knowledge of one’s qualitative experience: I am not qualitatively experiencing my qualitative experience—I have one steady flow of qualitative experience. The point is that, under Analytic Idealism, you are still conscious when you are in a coma—you just have lost your meta-consciousness and other higher level aspects to consciousness (such as potentially the ability to cognize). Consciousness isn’t just what bubbles up to the ego under Analytic Idealism—you are fundamentally qualitatively experiencing until you die. Under physicalism, this is not the case at all: consciousness is an emergent property and, as such, is only “on” when the higher levels of your brains abilities are “on”--thusly you aren’t conscious when you are in a coma.

At the least, I don't see how it counters my point about Blindsight. The person does not have any qualia, or consciousness, of seeing what is in front of their eyes.

Let me ask you this: what about blindsight indicates, to you, that they don’t have qualia? Simply because they can no longer identify that they are seeing?

Isn't it the attention to these, the conscious experience of them, that is qualia?

No, that is an aspect, a ability, of higher conscious forms. A being can be qualitatively experiencing while having not the capability to self-reflect about it. If you couldn’t self-reflect and acquire self-knowledge then you wouldn’t know that you just smelled that flower: you would just smell the flower—there wouldn’t be a self-reflective “I just smelled a flower”.

I suppose I'm looking for a separation between the meaning of qualia and perception or senses

To me, perceptions are representations of the world, which are qualitative (and thusly are constituted of instances of qualia). Qualia is any instance of qualitative experience, so, to me, there could be a being with qualitatively experiences but isn’t capable of providing itself with a reflection (a representation) of the world around it. For example, I think some plants, which are just strictly stimuli responses to the environment, are qualitatively experiencing (in the form of basic stimuli responses) but are not perceiving anything.

Sensations, on the other hand, are just the raw input which is also qualitative.

Generally I've understood qualia to be that conscious experience of sensations or perceptions, not the mere flooding of light or sound into one's body.

That’s fair. It is usually referred to in that manner simply because humans and higher animals are what are typically considered in the debate, but I would say that it equally applies to any instance of qualitative experience—not just higher conscious life forms.

Back to blindsight, it seems much like the inability to give a conscious focus to what one is perceiving.

But they are still perceiving and perception is qualitative.

Let me clarify what I'm stating. Qualia is the subjective experience of the thing which is observed to be objectively conscious. Qualia is not necessary for us to conclude something is objectively conscious. The reason for this, is we cannot objectively assess qualia. We cannot prove what a conscious being is experiencing, or not experiencing at a subjective level. Therefore we do not consider it objectively, but can only consider it from their subjective viewpoint.

So then are you advocating for epistemic solipsism? To me, this confirms that you can’t actually claim that objectively conscious beings are subjectively conscious and, thusly, we cannot know that there are other subjects but, rather, just that there are other observing beings.

How is this any different from magic then Bob?

Magic is when something poofs into existence from thin air—I am arguing that fundamentally reality is mind and, thusly, that the physical world is what the ideas within that mind appear upon our dashboard of experience. This is no different than when you have a dream and assume the character of a person (of which usually resembles yourself in real life) and view the “objective” dream world from that person’s perspective; and only after waking up do you realize that the entirety of the physical was just a representation of ideas. I don’t see how this is magic.

Thank you again Bob for your clear and deep thoughts on the subject!

And same to you my friend! I always enjoy our conversations!

Bob

quote="Bob Ross;814253"]The point is that I don’t. It is not a scientific fact that brains produce consciousness.[/quote]

We may be at an impasse here Bob. I respect your view point, but I can't agree on this one. Being able to express doubt about a theory does not disprove a theory. A scientific theory is not like the layman's meaning of theory.

"The way that scientists use the word 'theory' is a little different than how it is commonly used in the lay public," said Jaime Tanner, a professor of biology at Emerson College in Boston. "Most people use the word 'theory' to mean an idea or hunch that someone has, but in science the word 'theory' refers to the way that we interpret facts." https://www.livescience.com/21491-what-is-a-scientific-theory-definition-of-theory.html

One way to think of it is all the science up till now points to the brain, in the case of people, being the source of consciousness in people. Its like evolution. Its not a scientific law for sure, but every single attempt at refuting it has come up short. This is why I asked you to give a counter. You need to take the scientific knowledge that we have at this time and demonstrate why it cannot come from the brain. A simple way to do this is provide an alternative that we can use.

Quoting Bob Ross

This is why I always note a distinction, when discussing the hard problem, between awareness and experience: the former being “how a being has knowledge, be aware, of its environment” while the latter is “how a being has qualitative, subjective experience of its environment”.

I'm having a hard time understanding the difference between those terms. If you have knowledge of something, you are aware. And if you are aware, that attention is qualia is it not? Can you give me example of something that you could be aware of that was not also qualia, or subjective experience? To me it appears you're comparing unconscious awareness with conscious awareness.

Quoting Bob Ross

Explaining functions, for example, is an easy problem—e.g., a being can know that something is green by interpreting the wavelength of light reflected off of the object. However, explaining how those functions produce experience is a different story—e.g., why does the being also have a qualitative experience of the greenness of the object?

I'm not sure that's the right comparison. Its not "also have a qualitative experience", its "why is that a qualitative experience?" The interpretation of the wavelength by the brain is the qualia is it not? Perhaps with blindsight I can see it more to your viewpoint. The man sees something that he is not aware of. I suppose I would say his unconscious mind sees the object, but his conscious mind does not. So comparing that to your point, the unconscious mind would see green, while the conscious mind would not experience the qualia of green, but he would know that it was green. Is that a good comparison to what you're saying?

Does this also fit into your definition of awareness and experience? So in blindsight terms, we would say he is aware of the object in front of him, but he does not experience it in his qualia. Generally I would not use the term awareness for such a situation, but if that is your definition, and it fits this situation, then I think I understand your argument better. Please correct me here.

A good link to Chalmers. Let me point to these two paragraphs in section 2.

"The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does"

I've bolded that sentence explicitly. Chalmers agrees on the technical aspects of mind as brain within his easy problem explanation, so what is he saying here? He's not saying that we can't observe all of the processes that give rise to consciousness. He's asking, "Why is there subjective experience?" He's not saying, "Its impossible for the brain to produce subjective experience". He says it seems unreasonable, but it clearly does. We can simplify Chalmer's entire line of questioning to, "Since we cannot experience the subjective experience itself, how can we possibly reconcile subjective experience with the observable mechanics in front of us?"

The answer is of course, "We cant'." You and I agree on this entirely. We're only off by a slight understanding of what Chalmer's means here. Nothing we study about the brain will ever give us insight into its subjective experience. It is outside of our knowledge. That's why its a hard problem. The solution as I gave, is to work around it.

Quoting Bob Ross

The hard problem even admits that consciousness is explained through the brain

I think you may be misunderstanding. Yes, the hard problem presumes, in order to even be a problem in the first place, that one is trying to explain consciousness by the standard reductive naturalist methodological approach. However, this is not the same thing as it being true. The hard problem is only such for physicalism, not other accounts such as substance dualism and idealism.

According to Chalmer's here, it is not presumption. That is the easy problem. I do not care about physicalism, dualism, or idealism. I care about logical consistency, philosophical schools of thought be damned! :) To me its like I use a martial arts move that does not fit in with karate and someone berates me that it destroys karate. If the move is effective at defending oneself, what does it matter?

It is not that the hard problem comes about from physicalism, its that the hard problem is for our ability to understand the subjective nature of consciousness an an objective manner. Dualism and idealism are not objective, so of course the hard problem doesn't exist. When you don't care about objectivity, a lot of problems go away. I care about objectivity. Subjectivity has never interested me beyond some fun, "What ifs". Musing about the subjective without any objective basis is fantasy. While it is fun, it does not solve anything in reality.

Quoting Bob Ross

Again, I am not claiming that the mind does not come from the brain but, rather, that we cannot prove (even theoretically in the future) because reductive physicalism affords no such answers—the methodology fails in this regard.

Again, the fact that we cannot objectively experience the subjective experience of another brain itself, does not negate that the subjective experience is coming from the brain itself. Chalmers demonstrates that by the easy problem here:

"The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:
the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
the integration of information by a cognitive system;
the reportability of mental states;
the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
the focus of attention;
the deliberate control of behavior;
the difference between wakefulness and sleep."

All of this is consciousness, and all of that comes from the brain. Chalmers never disputes this. Please show where he does if I am mistaken.

Quoting Bob Ross

The form is as follows: “consciousness is [set of biological functions] because [set of biological functions] impacts consciousness [in this set of manners]”. That is the form of argumentation that a reductive naturalist methodology can afford and, upon close examination, there is a conceptual gap between consciousness being impacted in said manners and the set of biological functions (responsible for such impact) producing consciousness.

No, there is not a conceptual gap between the biology and the experience. Get someone drunk and they become inebriated. This is due to how alcohol affects the brain. No one disputes this. The only gap is you don't know what the other person is subjectively experiencing while they are drunk. Objective consciousness vs subjective consciousness.

Quoting Bob Ross

How do you explain modern day neuroscience? Medical Psychiatry? Brain surgery?

From an ontological agnostic’s perspective, those fields are getting much better at understanding the relation between brain states and mental states but they say nothing about what consciousness fundamentally is.

They can know what consciousness is objectively. They simply can't know what a consciousness experiences subjectively. Brain state A can be switched to state B, and every time they do, you see a Cat, then a Dog in your mind. You can tell them this, but no one knows what that experience you have of seeing a cat or dog is like.

Quoting Bob Ross

Think of it like the video game analogy: if a character, Rose, hooks up another character, Billy, to a brain scanner and observes Billy qualitatively experiencing a green tree, she would be factually wrong to conclude that the Billy’s brain states were causing his mental experience of it because, in fact, the tree and his brain and body are fundamentally representations of 0s and 1s in a computer. We conflate our dashboard of experience with what reality fundamentally is—mentality.

This just seems to be a language issue. The words I'm stating are not the subjective words in my head correct? When I type a sentence, you don't know everything I'm thinking. But that doesn't mean the words aren't an attempt to represent what I'm actually thinking right? The words that you are seeing are just a bunch of black pixels squiggled together. Without translation, someone who didn't speak English would have no clue that these squiggles mean anything.

So we can translate Billy's thoughts to comprehend that he is thinking of a tree, but of course we can't get to the actual subjective experience of Billy seeing a tree, because we're not the subject, or Billy in this case. If billy confirms he his seeing a tree after we hook up the computer, and every time the computer is hooked up, says Billy is thinking of a tree, and Billy then states, "I'm thinking of a tree", then we are on the road to causality. Current neuroscience is way past this simple example, and way past the point of possible correlation.

Quoting Bob Ross

Please find me a reputable neuroscience paper that shows that the brain most certainly does not produce consciousness, and then also provides evidence of what is.

If I could, then I would be proving myself wrong. The point is that science doesn’t afford an answer, so it would be contradictory of me to provide you with a scientific explanation, which is a reductive naturalistic approach, to afford an answer.

Again, I think we're in agreement that it is impossible for science to ever know what it is like to subjectively experience from the subject's viewpoint. This in no way backs a claim that the brain does not produce a subjective experience.

Quoting Bob Ross

Finally, just as an aside, how do you explain the mind seeing? The eyes connect through the optic nerve straight to your brain. It has no where else to go.

I would say, in summary, that the extrinsic representation of qualitatively seeing a world, from the side of another being that is qualitatively seeing, is light entering the physical eyes and brain interpreting it—but this is just the representation of it on our dashboard of experience.

Certainly, just like language is a representation of the thoughts I am trying to convey. It being a representation does not mean that language does not convey thoughts. It does not mean that I did not write them. It does not mean that I don't have thoughts. It just means you can never see my thoughts from my subjective viewpoint.

Quoting Bob Ross

Meta-consciousness is the knowledge of one’s qualitative experience: I am not qualitatively experiencing my qualitative experience—I have one steady flow of qualitative experience.

See I view the consciousness of knowledge as qualia. Unconsciously knowing things would not be qualia, or subjective consciousness to me. I see qualia as the subjective experience of consciousness. it is that attentive awareness. So in your viewpoint, if I am actively thinking, "I know 2+2 equals 4", is that qualia? If not, what is it?

Quoting Bob Ross

The point is that, under Analytic Idealism, you are still conscious when you are in a coma—you just have lost your meta-consciousness and other higher level aspects to consciousness (such as potentially the ability to cognize).

So according to my definition of consciousness, a person in a coma could be considered objectively unconscious, but still subjectively conscious. Even then, perhaps there are still aspects of the brain that are still conscious. So for example, if we analyzed their brain and found that they were dreaming. Would we be able to know what that dreaming was like? No, but dreaming is observing and identifying.

Also, for my sake, instead of saying, under a philosophical theory x results, can you simply give me the logic why X results? My experience with people citing such theories is that everyone has a different viewpoint on what that theory means, so I want to understand what it means to you.

Quoting Bob Ross

At the least, I don't see how it counters my point about Blindsight. The person does not have any qualia, or consciousness, of seeing what is in front of their eyes.

Let me ask you this: what about blindsight indicates, to you, that they don’t have qualia? Simply because they can no longer identify that they are seeing?

Qualia to me is something you experience. While the unconscious portion of the brain is processing, your subjective awareness is not. Qualia is the requirement for subjective consciousness. Unconscious processing is not qualia, at least to my understanding of the general use of the word.

Quoting Bob Ross

Isn't it the attention to these, the conscious experience of them, that is qualia?

No, that is an aspect, a ability, of higher conscious forms.

What is higher consciousness? Why is higher consciousness different from lower consciousness? You seem to be implying that higher consciousness is the ability to remember what you just did, then analyze it. How is that any different from my definition of observing than identifying?

Quoting Bob Ross

To me, perceptions are representations of the world, which are qualitative (and thusly are constituted of instances of qualia).

Just trying to get the vocabulary down here. Perceptions are sensations which a mind processes into a representation of the world. So I could have the smell of a flower flow through my nostrils, but if I don't try to represent it as anything beyond the sensation of the smell itself, I don't have a perception. That is very similar to my observations/identity point. I have a feeling we're both off slightly with each other through semantics than a clash of ideology.

Quoting Bob Ross

Sensations, on the other hand, are just the raw input which is also qualitative.

I also agree with this. I think the difference is that if I am not attentive to the sensation, its an unconscious sensation. You seem to imply that our direct attentiveness to it is not required. So in the case of blindsight, the man is conscious of that which he cannot attend to. Does this capture your thoughts correctly?

Quoting Bob Ross

So then are you advocating for epistemic solipsism? To me, this confirms that you can’t actually claim that objectively conscious beings are subjectively conscious and, thusly, we cannot know that there are other subjects but, rather, just that there are other observing beings.

For an easily identifiable terminology, yes. We cannot know what another's subjective experience is, or even if they have it. Blindsight is proof of that. What we can do is have a cogent belief that others do. We can also analyze this objectively by looking for the consequence of having a subjective viewpoint. If I know that the ability to observe an identify is my subjective consciousness, then I can conclude that it allows me to do things that I could not if I were not an observing and identifying being. As a very simple test, I could put a puzzle in front of another being.

Lets take a crow for example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGaUM_OngaY

In accordance to the definitions I've given, the crow is objectively conscious. Can we know what its like to be a conscious crow? No. Its impossible. Can we still objectively analyze its consciousness? Yes. Can we muse what it must feel like to be a crow? Of course, but its nothing we can know, just something we believe.

Finally, here's a link to a fairly good philosophy professor online who breaks down the hard problem. I'm posting it so that you know I understand the subject, and to also help clarify what I mean by the hard problem, and why we should just separate consciousness into objective and subjective branches. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaZbCctlll4

Thank you Bob for taking the time to really break down your methodology for me. This subject comes up every so often and I find most people are either unable or unwilling to really go into the details. Another long discussion already, but one that I am glad to explore!

Nagel said

Finally, so far as we can tell, our mental lives, including our subjective experiences, and those of other creatures are strongly connected with and probably strictly dependent on physical events in our brains and on the physical interaction of our bodies with the rest of the physical world.

I don't see how it could be said our consciousness would exist but for our brain.

However, that's not the same as an explanation of how the brain produces consciousness. That is, how do physical particles with their properties that we're aware of, acting in accordance with the forces that we're aware of, become aware of things, themselves, and their own awareness, and have subjective experience on top of the physical interactions? We know [I]where[/I] in the brain certain aspects of consciousness take place. But we don't know [I]how[/I]. I've never heard of a scientific theory that even addresses it. "It just does" seems to suffice. Adding more and more physical structures and process doesn't suggest it will ever become other than physical.

Quoting Patterner

We know where in the brain certain aspects of consciousness take place. But we don't know how.

Its because we cannot measure from within a conscious state. All objective measurements are from "without". We bounce stuff off of things to detect features. Vibrations for sound, photons for light. But consciousness is subjective, which means it comes from within a state. We can't currently bounce something at a state to measure what its like to be within that state.

Its not that we can't know how consciousness occurs by measuring brain states. Its only limited to an examination for consciousness as an observing being outside of the conscious state. We don't know "how" it is to be conscious from within the state, but we can know how it is conscious state outside, or the consequence of the actions of that inner state, work and function.

Quoting Philosophim

Its not that we can't know how consciousness occurs by measuring brain states.

If we can, can you explain it? Particles interacting with each other in the only ways they can, due to their properties and the forces acting upon them, are doing things other than interacting with each other in the only ways they can, due to their properties and the forces acting upon them. We know this subjectively, because we are each experiencing. And we know it objectively, because scans of our own brains during this experiencing reveal nothing but particles interacting with each other in the only ways they can, due to their properties and the forces acting upon them. What I mean is, we don’t look at those scans, and say, "What the...! What's going on there??" And if we didn’t know what the scans were, we would not think, "Ah. this is a conscious being." Because we are only seeing, if you will forgive me, particles interacting with each other in the only ways they can, due to their properties and the forces acting upon them.

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

We may be at an impasse here Bob. I respect your view point, but I can't agree on this one. Being able to express doubt about a theory does not disprove a theory. A scientific theory is not like the layman's meaning of theory.

Firstly, I agree that “theory” does not refer to the same thing as it is used in colloquial speech in science, and I was using it in its scientific sense.

Secondly, the problem is that the more we understand the brain + consciousness and the actual methodological approach science uses (i.e., reductive naturalism) the more we understand that our old ways of scientific explanation simply do not work with consciousness.

So I am saying that the scientific theory is wrong in the sense that it doesn’t prove what it thinks it does and, quite frankly, the only way to reconcile it in favor of it is to reach towards metaphysics.

I will refer back to the argument:

The form is as follows: “consciousness is [set of biological functions] because [set of biological functions] impacts consciousness [in this set of manners]”. That is the form of argumentation that a reductive naturalist methodology can afford and, upon close examination, there is a conceptual gap between consciousness being impacted in said manners and the set of biological functions (responsible for such impact) producing consciousness

And your response:

No, there is not a conceptual gap between the biology and the experience. Get someone drunk and they become inebriated. This is due to how alcohol affects the brain. No one disputes this. The only gap is you don't know what the other person is subjectively experiencing while they are drunk. Objective consciousness vs subjective consciousness.

I am not disputing, nor does the above argument contend, that medications and drugs affect our minds—I am not saying that, under a view where the brain does not produce consciousness, I would expect someone who gets drunk not to become impaired. I am likewise not claiming that we shouldn’t expect neural activity corresponding to where alcohol inhibits brain functions.

What I am saying is that explaining the qualitative experience that drunk person has in terms of the brain functions, as opposed to those functions being the extrinsic representation of mental activity, has the explanatory gap of ‘I see how those functions impact consciousness, but how do those functions produce consciousness?’. This can be clearly see, at least by my lights, in the abstract form of any argument reductive naturalism can afford in terms of explaining consciousness.
When you say “ The only gap is you don't know what the other person is subjectively experiencing while they are drunk”, I feel as though you are somewhat agreeing with me but you still do not agree that the qualitative experience is different than our conceptual account of the brain functions. For example:

I'm not sure that's the right comparison. Its not "also have a qualitative experience", its "why is that a qualitative experience?" The interpretation of the wavelength by the brain is the qualia is it not?

Seeing with a brain scanner that alcholol inhibits this and that doesn’t produce any conceptual explanation of how the brain functions (inhibited or still functional) are producing the qualitative experience (e.g., the drunk person’s experience of seeing the color red) of that person. That’s where the explanatory gap is. Likewise, the interpretation of a wavelength and your brain’s ability to acquire that it is green doesn’t conceptually explain your qualitative experience of the greeness. If you already hold that the brain produces consciousness, then, yes, I would expect you to try to explain the mental event as the wavelength interpretation: but whether one can actually give a conceptual reductive explanation of that is what is in question.

I think you may agree with me here insofar as you hold some aspect of our subjective experience as off limits (and thusly non-reducible to the brain), and, in that case, it is important to note that if you agree then I think you are conceding that you do not have an conceptual account of how a mind-independent brain allegedly produces consciousness and, thusly, you cannot prove it. I am not saying it is impossible nor that it isn’t the case: I am saying you cannot prove it if you cannot conceptually reduce mental states (such as seeing the color red) to brain states—and, no, as seen in the form of the argument, appealing to how functions impact consciousness says nothing about them producing consciousness.

I'm having a hard time understanding the difference between those terms. If you have knowledge of something, you are aware. And if you are aware, that attention is qualia is it not?

No. Awareness is more generic than being conscious in the sense that I am using it. The former is just the ability to quantitatively observe one’s environment (like an AI) while the latter a qualitative experience of one’s environment (like a human). An AI does not know what it is like to see red qualitatively: when it ‘sees’ red, it is just mechanically registering that it was red based off of wavelengths, but it has no qualitative experience of it.

To me it appears you're comparing unconscious awareness with conscious awareness.

Yes I am. If a being has no qualitative experience, they may be still aware of their environment (like an AI, or a speed gun).

The man sees something that he is not aware of. I suppose I would say his unconscious mind sees the object, but his conscious mind does not. So comparing that to your point, the unconscious mind would see green, while the conscious mind would not experience the qualia of green, but he would know that it was green. Is that a good comparison to what you're saying?

This isn’t what I am saying, but I would like to go with it to explain my previous points above: when you explain that he knows that it was green you can easily explain this in terms of brain states (and what not), but you can’t explain why, when the person doesn’t have blindsight, why they consciously experience the greeness. The conceptual gap lies exactly between the explanation of how a being unconsciously knows the color and consciously experiences it. Under the conceptual explanations of physicalism (that the mind is produced by the brain), there is absolutely no reason why there would be a qualitative experience of the greenness on top of the brain merely mechanically interpreting the wavelengths.

Now I am not saying that about blindsight (but only wanted to use it to hopefully convey the conceptual gap better), I am saying two things:

1. Blindsight patients only prove that people can lose the ability to identify with the conscious (qualitative) experience, and that is indicated by them:

A) Clearly being able to see; and
B) Answering that they aren’t seeing; and because I
C) Consider it a better explanation to hold that all life is qualitatively experiencing (so long as they are alive), so I think it makes more sense to say that they are qualitatively experiencing.

In terms of C, obviously I anticipate you are going to disagree with that, but the justification is depending on the resolution of the hard problem (or lack thereof). So I will put a pin it for now.

2. Blindsight patients, if #1 isn’t the case, demonstrate potentially that they have lost (at least partially) there meta-consciousness (i.e., the ability to be aware of their qualitative experience). So, instead of being unable to identify with their qualitative experience but it still is happening, they may not even have it anymore (because of something getting damaged). Again, I think animals can be qualitatively experiencing without being aware that they are: without having self-knowledge.

Does this also fit into your definition of awareness and experience? So in blindsight terms, we would say he is aware of the object in front of him, but he does not experience it in his qualia.

Exactly! I am not actually claiming that the blindsight person is aware of the object but not conscious, but this is a perfect depiction of the conceptual gap with a reductive methodological approach. Appealing to reductive accounts only provides evidence of a person being aware and not experiencing: the experiencing they are having is extra phenomena that isn’t expected under that account (physicalism) of the world.

Now I think you may be able to see the conceptual gap in explaining the qualitative experience of the greeness (of the pen) by appealing to “the wavelengths are interpreted by the brain as green”: the latter only explains bare awareness and doesn’t explain at all why there would be qualia. Thusly, this doesn’t prove that the qualitative experience of the greeness is reducible to the brain’s interpretation of the wavelength: this is the conceptual gap.

He's asking, "Why is there subjective experience?" He's not saying, "Its impossible for the brain to produce subjective experience". He says it seems unreasonable, but it clearly does

I agree. I think that Chalmer’s is still trying to explain consciousness by a physicalist metaphysical account of the world and he didn’t fully see it as an irreconcilable problem. But that is usually how hard problem’s are first formulated: the person still has allegiance to the core theory that they are positing a dilemma for. Nowadays, I think it is recognized a lot more, by philosophers in philosophy of mind, as irreconcilable for physicalism.

My point is that “but it clearly does” is incredibly unwarranted. He give’s zero conceptual account reductively of how it “clearly does”. I think he was still thinking just in the sense that brains affect conscious experience.

Nothing we study about the brain will ever give us insight into its subjective experience. It is outside of our knowledge. That's why its a hard problem.

Given what I have said hitherto, if you agree with me that we cannot gain insight into qualitative experience then you are equally conceding that we cannot reduce qualitative experience to brain states; which means you have no proof that the former really is from the latter.

According to Chalmer's here, it is not presumption. That is the easy problem.

Chalmer’s never said that consciousness (as qualitative experience) being explained through the brain is an easy problem, he said that awareness aspects of consciousness (such as the functions which you quoted later on) are easy problems. His use of the term “consciousness” includes ‘awareness’ and ‘experience’. Within his schema, yes, the awareness aspects of consciousness are easy problems (if that is what you are talking about). But he isn’t saying that qualitative experience is an easy problem.

I do not care about physicalism, dualism, or idealism. I care about logical consistency, philosophical schools of thought be damned! :) To me its like I use a martial arts move that does not fit in with karate and someone berates me that it destroys karate. If the move is effective at defending oneself, what does it matter?

I respect that, but the terms are good quick and general depictions of the fully thought out, logically consistent, metaphysical views. If you hold that the brain produces consciousness, then the only logically consistent views available to you are physicalist accounts of the world: there’s no way around that.

It is not that the hard problem comes about from physicalism, its that the hard problem is for our ability to understand the subjective nature of consciousness an an objective manner

I have to push back here: it is absolutely due to one’s metaphysical commitment to the brain producing consciousness, which is only claimed in physicalist accounts of the world (by definition). Your second sentence implicitly depends on a physicalist account of the world being true; and this just muddies the waters when someone uses it implicitly but denounces it explicitly. Philosophim, if you think that the brain produces consciousness and the brain (and the world) is mind-independent, then you are a physicalist. By ‘physicalist’, I do not mean one oddly specific and straw manned position, I just mean that you are subscribing to a view that is a part of the metaphysical family of views under physicalism. I don’t see how you can argue around this.

Dualism and idealism are not objective, so of course the hard problem doesn't exist. When you don't care about objectivity, a lot of problems go away

If by “objective” you mean “something which we can empirically observe”, then no metaphysical theory, including physicalism (including the view that the brain produces consciousness), “cares” about “objectivity”. This is why I worry when you denounce physicalism but then implicitly use it in your arguments: it seems like you think you aren’t engaging in metaphysics.

They can know what consciousness is objectively. They simply can't know what a consciousness experiences subjectively. Brain state A can be switched to state B, and every time they do, you see a Cat, then a Dog in your mind. You can tell them this, but no one knows what that experience you have of seeing a cat or dog is like.

Again, please remember that “they can know what awareness is objectively”--not experience.

Again, I think we're in agreement that it is impossible for science to ever know what it is like to subjectively experience from the subject's viewpoint. This in no way backs a claim that the brain does not produce a subjective experience.

If science can’t prove that you experience, then (1) you are engaging in metaphysics when you claim that the brain produces consciousness and (2) experience is irreducible to the brain states because we cannot conceptually prove it (by the reductive naturalist method, which is the same one science uses).

So in your viewpoint, if I am actively thinking, "I know 2+2 equals 4", is that qualia? If not, what is it?

I would say that it is qualitative in the sense that it occurred at a timestamp within a steady flow of qualitative time, but it was non-spatial—so not qualitative pertaining to that. Likewise, I would also hold that the imagination is qualitative. I hold that our faculty of reason is a sense that takes perceptions in as its input and generates concepts of them.

Also, for my sake, instead of saying, under a philosophical theory x results, can you simply give me the logic why X results? My experience with people citing such theories is that everyone has a different viewpoint on what that theory means, so I want to understand what it means to you.

I will do my absolute best! I agree that people tend to hide being names and badges; However, I think it is important to note that you are making metaphysical claims, not just scientific ones.

What is higher consciousness? Why is higher consciousness different from lower consciousness?

Through evolution, not all conscious beings have the same capabilities—e.g., my dog lacks the cognitive capabilities to abstract his perceptions as much (or at all) like I can. Likewise, some beings are qualitatively experiencing, but have no perceptions (i.e., they cannot represent the world to themselves), such as some plants. Higher vs. lower consciousness is the abilities/faculties a being has in relation to others. We evolved to have higher capacities and abilities than other animals.

Perceptions are sensations which a mind processes into a representation of the world.

Correct.

You seem to imply that our direct attentiveness to it is not required. So in the case of blindsight, the man is conscious of that which he cannot attend to

I believe so (if I am understanding you correctly). My mind’s ability to identify with or have self-knowledge of the qualitative experience is different than merely having it. He cannot “attend to it” because he isn’t meta-conscious or perhaps he simply can’t identify as “his self” having them (so it could be an ownership thing).

Finally, here's a link to a fairly good philosophy professor online who breaks down the hard problem. I'm posting it so that you know I understand the subject, and to also help clarify what I mean by the hard problem, and why we should just separate consciousness into objective and subjective branches.

I never doubted that you have studied and looked into the hard problem! I think we have different interpretations of it.

Thank you Bob for taking the time to really break down your methodology for me. This subject comes up every so often and I find most people are either unable or unwilling to really go into the details. Another long discussion already, but one that I am glad to explore!

As always, I am glad to explore it as well!

I look forward to hearing from you,
Bob

Quoting Patterner

Its not that we can't know how consciousness occurs by measuring brain states.
— Philosophim
If we can, can you explain it?

Sure, lets use a modern medical practice, anesthesia. If you've ever had a major surgery, they give you different types of chemicals with the sole purpose of knocking you unconscious. Here's a paper talking about anesthesia and unconsciousness if you're interested. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2743249/#:~:text=According%20to%20this%20framework%2C%20anesthetics,patterns%20available%20to%20cortical%20networks).

Let me also clarify what I mean. We cannot get inside of the subject of consciousness. Its impossible. No outside measurement will reveal what is inside. Subjective consciousness is inside. But can we measure brain states and find causality between a person's ability to express subjective consciousness? Absolutely. To think the brain does not cause consciousness is to invalidate decades of working science and medicine.

Quoting Bob Ross

What I am saying is that explaining the qualitative experience that drunk person has in terms of the brain functions, as opposed to those functions being the extrinsic representation of mental activity, has the explanatory gap of ‘I see how those functions impact consciousness, but how do those functions produce consciousness?’.

Perhaps its the construction of your sentence I disagree with, and maybe not your underlying point. The problem is you keep saying "impact" as if its different from "cause". They aren't. Now, does that mean they are the entire cause? No one could say that. But you can't separate "impact" from "cause". They are essentially the same thing.

What I think you're trying to get at, as this is what the real problem of "consciousness" is, is that you cannot see the internal subjectiveness of a function. We see because light bounces off of objects. Measurement is essentially all done by bouncing something off another thing. But a subjective experience is the internal process of matter and energy. We cannot "bounce" off of the subjective internal. We can see the brain and its functions by bouncing off photons and other measuring tools, but those are inadequate to get inside the thing itself.

Quoting Bob Ross

When you say “ The only gap is you don't know what the other person is subjectively experiencing while they are drunk”, I feel as though you are somewhat agreeing with me but you still do not agree that the qualitative experience is different than our conceptual account of the brain functions.

Perhaps the confusion is that I am talking about the external measurement of consciousness, not the internal. Regardless of the qualia one experiences, the brain states are the outside objective measurements of that creation. If an apple falls from a tree, gravity suddenly impacts the living cells. They react to it. Do we know what its like to experience that reaction internally as a cell or group of cells? No, its impossible. Does gravity still affect the apple and we can observe the reaction of the cells? Yes.

Quoting Bob Ross

Seeing with a brain scanner that alcholol inhibits this and that doesn’t produce any conceptual explanation of how the brain functions (inhibited or still functional) are producing the qualitative experience (e.g., the drunk person’s experience of seeing the color red) of that person. That’s where the explanatory gap is.

To be clear from my end: the brain scanner cannot measure the internal experience of what its like to have the qualia of being drunk. It can scan the brain and note that the individual is inebriated, and through testing, we can note that when the brain is in a particular state, inebriation of the subject occurs. Hands down Bob, alcohol changes the brain which causes drunkenness. That's not debatable. What you seem to think is that because we cannot measure the internal subjective experience of consciousness, that we can't say the brain causes consciousness. That doesn't work. Its illogical.

Quoting Bob Ross

If you already hold that the brain produces consciousness, then, yes, I would expect you to try to explain the mental event as the wavelength interpretation: but whether one can actually give a conceptual reductive explanation of that is what is in question.

Its not in question. We can give a conceptual reductive explanation of why alcohol inebriates a person. We cannot give a conceptual reductive explanation of what it is like to internally experience that inebriation. This is because we cannot measure the subjective with the tools we have. That does not mean the objective measurements of what we can measure, suddenly cannot make objective conclusions and measurements of consciousness by the beings actions and responses.

Quoting Bob Ross

I think you may agree with me here insofar as you hold some aspect of our subjective experience as off limits (and thusly non-reducible to the brain), and, in that case, it is important to note that if you agree then I think you are conceding that you do not have an conceptual account of how a mind-independent brain allegedly produces consciousness and, thusly, you cannot prove it. I am not saying it is impossible nor that it isn’t the case: I am saying you cannot prove it if you cannot conceptually reduce mental states (such as seeing the color red) to brain states—and, no, as seen in the form of the argument, appealing to how functions impact consciousness says nothing about them producing consciousness.

Again, I think the issue here is vocabulary. Functions cause consciousness. "Impact" is part of causality. If a cue ball impacts the eight ball, it causes it to fly in a particular direction. Cause is what produces an affect. If I touch a person's brain with an electrode at a particular location, scan the brain, and they say, I see a red car, I start to associate brain scans with their expression of what they consciously perceive. If we can repeat it every time and the person is being honest, then we see the brain causes the person to see the color red.

What we cannot see is the internal of being that brain stimulus. We can see the neuron's cascade. We can see they do it every time and produce a particular result. But that is all by external measurement. We cannot measure internally. We cannot measure existence as its subject. Our inability to do so does not mean that the external results of brain stimulation suddenly do not cause consciousness. Its proven. There's no gap here. The only gap is again, our inability to measure something as a subject itself.

Quoting Bob Ross

Given what I have said hitherto, if you agree with me that we cannot gain insight into qualitative experience then you are equally conceding that we cannot reduce qualitative experience to brain states; which means you have no proof that the former really is from the latter.

We're so close on agreement here Bob! The only problem is that we have reduced qualitative experience to brain states repeatedly in science and medicine for decades. I really feel at this point you're just using the wrong words to describe a situation. We can measure qaulitative brain states to measure levels of consciousness as an outside observer. we can never measure qualitative brain states to measure levels of conscousness as an inside observer, the subject itself.

Quoting Bob Ross

Chalmer’s never said that consciousness (as qualitative experience) being explained through the brain is an easy problem, he said that awareness aspects of consciousness (such as the functions which you quoted later on) are easy problems.

Agreed, this is what I meant.

Quoting Bob Ross

If you hold that the brain produces consciousness, then the only logically consistent views available to you are physicalist accounts of the world: there’s no way around that.

Again, you'll have to explain what you mean by physicalist. Yes, the terms are great if everyone holds exactly to what they are and if we all agreed on what they meant. In experience for any serious discussion, I've found the person using the term must clearly explain what they mean as it is often a subjective use for them.

Quoting Bob Ross

Dualism and idealism are not objective, so of course the hard problem doesn't exist. When you don't care about objectivity, a lot of problems go away

If by “objective” you mean “something which we can empirically observe”, then no metaphysical theory, including physicalism (including the view that the brain produces consciousness), “cares” about “objectivity”.

No, objectivity is something that can be logically concluded to the point that any challenge against it fails. A falsifiable claim that cannot be shown to be false essentially.

I believe you define qualia as Quoting Bob Ross

Nowadays, I think it is recognized a lot more, by philosophers in philosophy of mind, as irreconcilable for physicalism.

Would you mind linking to a philosopher who believes that mind does not come from the brain? I would like to read from one.

Quoting Bob Ross

Philosophim, if you think that the brain produces consciousness and the brain (and the world) is mind-independent, then you are a physicalist.

I'm not sure what you mean by "mind-independent". The brain and the mind are one. Mind is not independent of matter and energy, it is the internal result of matter and energy. We are not separated from matter and energy. We are matter and energy. Which tells us that matter and energy can be conscious in the right combination. If that makes me a physicalist or contradicts a physicalist view according to your view of physicalism, I don't care.

The point is it is logically consistent to hold that matter and energy can create consciousness internally. We can see evidence of this internal experience by our own experience, and the actions that an internal consciousness results in. But knowing what the subjective experience of matter and energy that is not ourselves, is currently impossible with our tools and understanding of reality.

Quoting Bob Ross

So in your viewpoint, if I am actively thinking, "I know 2+2 equals 4", is that qualia? If not, what is it?

I would say that it is qualitative in the sense that it occurred at a timestamp within a steady flow of qualitative time, but it was non-spatial—so not qualitative pertaining to that. Likewise, I would also hold that the imagination is qualitative. I hold that our faculty of reason is a sense that takes perceptions in as its input and generates concepts of them.

Then this disagrees with every notion of qualia I've ever known. If "you" are thinking, that's "your" qualia. Qualia is "you" experiencing something. I can observe and identify thoughts correct? I can consciously dream. This is a massive definition gap in the discussion, and if this is not agreed upon, we will simply talk past each other.

In my understanding of qualia, qualia is a base requirement for consciousness. Meaning that like all tigers are cats, all consciousness is qualia. It is possible to have qualia but not have consciousness. From my example, one could observe, but not attempt to identify. This is qualia. But if you are thinking, you are observing and identifying. Therefore that is consciousness.

Your proposal of qualia seems to imply a person can be conscious of something, but not have qualia of that something. That seems very contradictory to me. Can you try to give a logical reason why? Lets remove qualitative and spatial as I think these terms add nothing to the point. Nothing in your head is spatial, and any identification can be considered qualitative upon examination. "4" and "red" are just concepts that we give a limit to, but we're talking about the qualia of experiencing "4" and "red". You're a person thinking "2+2=4". Why is that any different from "I see the color red"?

Quoting Bob Ross

However, I think it is important to note that you are making metaphysical claims, not just scientific ones.

I view the term "metaphysical" as its most base definition. "Analysis of the physical". Put another way, its the interpretation of reality in a way that makes logically consistent assessments of that reality. All language is metaphysical. As such, I find the term not very useful. All that matters to me is if my definitions are consistent, logical, and accurate in assessing reality.

Quoting Bob Ross

What is higher consciousness? Why is higher consciousness different from lower consciousness?

Through evolution, not all conscious beings have the same capabilities—e.g., my dog lacks the cognitive capabilities to abstract his perceptions as much (or at all) like I can.

So really this is the ability for a being to be conscious of more abstracts than another. If that's the case I don't see how higher consciousness affects any of the points here. Its still consciousness, just more of it.

Quoting Bob Ross

You seem to imply that our direct attentiveness to it is not required. So in the case of blindsight, the man is conscious of that which he cannot attend to

I believe so (if I am understanding you correctly). My mind’s ability to identify with or have self-knowledge of the qualitative experience is different than merely having it. He cannot “attend to it” because he isn’t meta-conscious or perhaps he simply can’t identify as “his self” having them (so it could be an ownership thing).

Again, this is a unique view of consciousness to me. I have never heard of consciousness without qualia.

After thinking about the larger discussion, I believe I can summarize our differences down to a few points. We may have to simply agree to disagree on some of these points, but I think a conclusion one way or the other on these will bring the discussion to a close.

1. The definition of qualia

I define qualia as essentially "subjective experience". This subjective experience does not need to be identified, but a stream of sensations, emotions, etc. would be qualia. Anything that I do not subjectively experience, for example the blood pumping through my left leg, would not be qualia.

You seem to think that there is a subjective experience that is qualia, and and a subjective experience that is qualitative. A person can have a qualitative experience without having qualia. This seems a semantic difference from my above evaluation. However, our conclusions differ. You seem to imply that something quantitative that does not have qualia is conscious, while I would call that an unconscious event. To help clarify this issue, what would you define as unconscious?

2. You believe that because we cannot measure the subjective experience of being conscious, that this proves that we cannot claim that consciousness comes from brain states. I note that science and medicine has for years evaluated objective consciousness through medicine and has determined that brain states cause consciousness. I also note that we cannot measure the subjective experience of consciousness, but that it is irrelevant to the conclusion that brains cause consciousness as objective measures of consciousness aren't trying to evaluate subjective measures, just objective outcomes.

I hope that summary accurately depicts our current differences, as well as some similar stances we hold. I honestly believe that we're not very far from one another's view points, and it seems a few semantical differences are leading to two different conclusions. Thanks again Bob, I look forward to hearing from you.

Reply to Janus

Hello Janus,

“I would argue that they do not “see” in the same manner (i.e., one is qualitatively seeing while the other is just quantitatively processing its environment), so I think you are equivocating when using the term “seeing” in this sentence to refer to both.”
--Bob Ross

I would argue that if there is no awareness of seeing that it makes no sense to speak of qualitative seeing.

I am unsure as to your point here in terms of your quote of me. I was saying that you were equivocating ‘seeing’ when referring to quantitative processing of one’s environment vs. qualitatively experiencing one’s environment.

Moreover, one can be qualitatively ‘seeing’ without having the self-knowledge that they are, so I am unsure as to what you mean by “no awareness of seeing” somehow entails that there is nothing to be said about them qualitatively ‘seeing’.

Again I would say that being disassocited from experience is the same as having no (qualitative) experience

This is just false. There are people who are disassociated from themselves, who have lost all sense of self, but we don’t say that they thereby do not exist simply because they can no longer identify with their existence. Likewise, one can have qualitative experience while failing to identify as having them.

Quality is a judgement which is all in the conscious modelling.

What is the “conscious modelling”?

Bob

Reply to Bob Ross I think it all depends on what you mean by "qualitative seeing". People with colour agnosia can "guess" with not perfect, but greater than random accuracy, what colour card is being held before their eyes, for example. They are not actually aware of seeing the colour, but that greater than random accuracy of guessing shows that the data which would normally produce an experience of colour is registered by the brain and can be more or less reliably accessed even though the conscious qualitative experience is absent.

My point is that I would not refer to the brain's mere registration of the data as qualitive experience or seeing. If you don't agree, then all we will be arguing about is terminology, and there cannot be a definitive right answer. So, I'm saying that to me, it makes no sense to speak of qualitive experience in the absence of awareness of that experience.

Quoting Bob Ross

Quality is a judgement which is all in the conscious modelling.

What is the “conscious modelling”?

Conscious modeling is conceptual modeling made possible by re-cognition. We say things have qualities because we recognize similarities. Take red as an example; we call red things red because they look similar to one another, and there is a great range of different red. But on either side towards yellow and blue we reach points where we would say a thing is orange or mauve or purple.

Quoting Philosophim

To think the brain does not cause consciousness is to invalidate decades of working science and medicine.

That answers the question of Where. My question is of How. How do the physical processes that explain our senses, and our behaviors resulting from the signals our senses send to the brain, [I]also[/I] aware at different levels? These physical processes are doing two things at once, and one of them isn't physical. And the one that isn't physical isn't necessary. There are living things that react to stimuli without awareness of the stimuli or their reaction to it. We have also built machines like this. [I]If[/I] our awareness is causal, then their benefit, and the reason evolution choose for them, is obvious. But it still doesn't explain the How. (If our awareness is not causal, of course, and merely observes our actions, which are simply physics-driven interactions of particles, then it is of no value, and there is no reason evolution would have selected for it.)

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

1. The definition of qualia

I think that, in hindsight, it isn’t helping our conversation to call qualia “subjective experience” (in your case) nor “qualitative experience” (in my case) because the meaning of the word just gets pushed back into what “subjective” and “qualitative” mean; and I don’t think we are agreeing on that aspect. So let me try to use a more technical definition of ‘qualia’: ‘a mental event whereof there is something it is like to have such in and of itself’.

Let’s go back to the blindsight person. When they see, there is still something it is like to see (qualitatively) as they do, but they cannot identify that they are the one’s having it. Another example is a person who has dreams but doesn’t identify as having them: they still have the dream and there is something like to have the dreams, but they have lost the cognitive ability to self-reflectively identify with having it. In these cases, there is still something it is like in and of itself to qualitatively experience (e.g., to see in the case of a blindsight person or to dream in the other case) and, thusly, they still have qualia. However, it is a different discussion whether they have meta-consciousness, which, to make it clearly, I would say can include both self-reflective cognition and introspection.

Let’s take another example: blinking. Most of the time, ‘I am’, as the ‘Ego’, do not have introspective access to my qualitative experience of blinking but, lo and behold, if ‘I’ focus on it (e.g., you tell me “don’t forget to blink!”) then it “bubbles up” to the “ego” and I have introspective access. In both cases, there is still something it is like to experience blinking even though I do not have introspective access, as the ego, in both scenarios. The conscious experience is still happening.

2. You believe that because we cannot measure the subjective experience of being conscious, that this proves that we cannot claim that consciousness comes from brain states. I note that science and medicine has for years evaluated objective consciousness through medicine and has determined that brain states cause consciousness. I also note that we cannot measure the subjective experience of consciousness, but that it is irrelevant to the conclusion that brains cause consciousness as objective measures of consciousness aren't trying to evaluate subjective measures, just objective outcomes

You switched the terminology mid-argument here: the first sentence is about “consciousness” in the sense of qualitative experience—i.e., qualia—and the second was about mere observance/awareness. Pointing out that science can evaluate the “objective consciousness”, which is just mere awareness with no necessity of qualia, has nothing to do with the claim in the first sentence. If you are going to say we can evaluate “objective consciousness”, in the manner you have described, then you can’t equally claim that that gives us insight into “subjective consciousness” which is what you would need to prove “subjective consciousness” is caused by brain states. This is why keeping the terminology very tight is vital, I think you conflated “consciousness” multiple times the above quote.

Perhaps its the construction of your sentence I disagree with, and maybe not your underlying point. The problem is you keep saying "impact" as if its different from "cause". They aren't. Now, does that mean they are the entire cause? No one could say that. But you can't separate "impact" from "cause". They are essentially the same thing.

Yes, agree that normally by cause we mean “physical causality”. What I mean by “cause” is the actual reductive explanation of phenomena and not necessarily a physical chain of impact. So, for me, “impact” and “cause” are two different things. If you would like to use them as synonymous, then we could use “cause” and “explanation” to denote the same distinction I am trying to make.

What I think you're trying to get at, as this is what the real problem of "consciousness" is, is that you cannot see the internal subjectiveness of a function

My problem is that you seem to be claiming that “objective consciousness” and “subjective consciousness” are two sides of the same coin, and the side we see is just relative to our epistemic access (e.g., my private qualia looks like observation, identifying, and action from a public eye); but by this “objective” observation of “consciousness” we gain absolutely no insight into the being also qualitatively experiencing—there is a disconnect there in your argument. When I refer to “consciousness”, I am talking about that private qualia that we definitely cannot empirically observe (which I think you are agreeing with me here) and this has no connection to an empirical merely observation of a being observing, identifying, and acting upon its environment.

Let me try to be very specific. I think, under your view, you cannot account for your qualia as reducible to brain states (but you can reduce your ability to observe, identify, and act upon your environment as reducible thereto) and you cannot know that anyone else has qualia—you can only effectively know the PZ aspect. Thusly, you cannot claim that science, which is empirical analysis that you concede gives us no knowledge of beings having qualia, has proven that qualia is reducible to the brain but you can claim that science can reduce our ability to observe, identify, and act upon our environment. Do you see how these are completely separate claims? And that the hard problem pertains exactly to the part which you cannot prove is reducible to brain states?

Hands down Bob, alcohol changes the brain which causes drunkenness. That's not debatable. What you seem to think is that because we cannot measure the internal subjective experience of consciousness, that we can't say the brain causes consciousness. That doesn't work. Its illogical.

What is illogical about claiming that the phenomenal world, which includes brains, is an extrinsic representation of the mental?

What is illogical about saying that we have cannot account for “consciousness” in the sense of qualia (qualitative experience) in terms of the reductive naturalist approach? Again, I think you may be conflating your use of “consciousness” in terms of “objectively” with “subjectively”--and the hard problem only pertains to the latter. The objective aspect you refer to doesn’t matter in terms of whether the brain causes or doesn’t cause mental events.

If a cue ball impacts the eight ball, it causes it to fly in a particular direction.

Correct, but from my perspective, as an idealist, what is fundamentally going on there is a representation of mental events—there are no mind-independent cue balls hitting each other: there isn’t series of cue balls that exist beyond consciousness experience (other than as ideas in a mind). The physical causality you are referring to is what it looks like from our perceptions of those ideas playing out, so to speak.

Our inability to do so does not mean that the external results of brain stimulation suddenly do not cause consciousness. Its proven. There's no gap here. The only gap is again, our inability to measure something as a subject itself.

Being able to associate people’s mental activity with brain states doesn’t prove in itself that the latter causes (i.e., reductively explains) the former: you keep bringing up examples of this as if it does prove it. Why do you think it proves it?

We're so close on agreement here Bob! The only problem is that we have reduced qualitative experience to brain states repeatedly in science and medicine for decades. I really feel at this point you're just using the wrong words to describe a situation. We can measure qaulitative brain states to measure levels of consciousness as an outside observer. we can never measure qualitative brain states to measure levels of conscousness as an inside observer, the subject itself.

I am confused, as you agreed with me that we cannot reduce “subjective consciousness” to brain states and that is all that matters for the debate on the hard problem—and there has never been such a proof in medicine nor science. Please send me anything that you think proves it in either of those fields.

What you are referring to, I think, is our ability to affect consciousness with what looks like from our perceptions as physical objects (e.g., popping a pill to get rid of my headache, cutting part of a brain off and observing the person’s personality change, etc.). This doesn’t mean that we have a reductive, conceptual account of brain states producing mental states. Within my perspective, popping a pill is just an extrinsic representation of mentality: the pill doesn’t fundamentally exist as something physical.

Again, you'll have to explain what you mean by physicalist.

I mean a person who holds that the world is fundamentally mind-independent: it is made up of non-conscious, mind-independent ‘parts’. Idealists, on the other hand, is a person who thinks it is mind-dependent: it is made up of a mind and everything is in mind.

No, objectivity is something that can be logically concluded to the point that any challenge against it fails. A falsifiable claim that cannot be shown to be false essentially.

What do you mean by “logically concluded to the point that any challenge against it fails”? Do you mean logical necessity?

I would say that objectivity is that which its truthity is will-independent.

Also, “a falsifiable claim that cannot be shown to be false” is a contradiction in terms. If it is falsifiable, then it is possible to shown to be false, whereas an unfalsifiable claim is something which cannot be shown to be false.

Would you mind linking to a philosopher who believes that mind does not come from the brain? I would like to read from one.

In terms of modern day philosophers, Bernardo Kastrup is a good one. You can read his free papers at https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html. I would recommend reading Analytic-Idealism: a Consciousness-dependent Ontology for a good general quick-ish read.

In terms of older philosophers, which are still pertinent but didn’t flesh out the views 100% accurately, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a must pre-requisite, then Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (both volumes), and Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning Principles of Human Understanding. I would suggest just starting with Kastrup for an introductory read.

I'm not sure what you mean by "mind-independent". The brain and the mind are one.

Not quite. Either the brain produces the mind, and thusly the mind is an emergent property thereof (and so they are not one and the same) or vice-versa.

The point is it is logically consistent to hold that matter and energy can create consciousness internally.

Something being logically consistent doesn’t make it true in metaphysics nor science: idealism and physicalism are both logically consistent.

So I agree with you here but not with your implication that it gives your view the upper-hand.

Then this disagrees with every notion of qualia I've ever known. If "you" are thinking, that's "your" qualia. Qualia is "you" experiencing something

Not at all: if by “thinking” you mean the normal usage of the word (e.g., I am thinking “I want some bread”). Think of lower-life forms, like squirrels: they don’t self-reflectively know (cognitively) that there is something it is like to see from there eyes nor that they qualitatively experience in general. According to your definition, then, one would likewise have to have the over-and-above cognitive abilities to gain self-knowledge of one’s qualia, which is different than the qualia itself.

Your proposal of qualia seems to imply a person can be conscious of something, but not have qualia of that something.

Not under my definitions. But under yours: yes. That is the whole point I am trying to make: under your argument your “objective consciousness” is referring, in terms of what it can prove, to only PZs.

"4" and "red" are just concepts that we give a limit to, but we're talking about the qualia of experiencing "4" and "red". You're a person thinking "2+2=4". Why is that any different from "I see the color red"?

Correct. But the cogitated “2+2=4” or “I am seeing the color red” are self-reflective notions of the qualia--they are not the qualia themselves.

I view the term "metaphysical" as its most base definition. "Analysis of the physical"

This isn’t what metaphysics means: it is the “study of that which is beyond the possibility of all experience”. For example, are there Universals or just particulars? Does the ‘now’ have ontological privilege (or is it a timeblock)? Is the world fundamentally mental or physical? These are metaphysical questions.

Your definition implies more like our self-reflective cognitive abilities, which has nothing to do with the subject.

So really this is the ability for a being to be conscious of more abstracts than another. If that's the case I don't see how higher consciousness affects any of the points here. Its still consciousness, just more of it.

You can think of it as “better” consciousness while they all are still consciousness.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Bob

Quoting Bob Ross

So let me try to use a more technical definition of ‘qualia’: ‘a mental event whereof there is something it is like to have such in and of itself’.

I think this is a good approach and agree on this.

Quoting Bob Ross

In these cases, there is still something it is like in and of itself to qualitatively experience (e.g., to see in the case of a blindsight person or to dream in the other case) and, thusly, they still have qualia.

I like your separation of qualitative and qualia at first, but then you erase the distinction making qualitative experience just a subordinate of qualia. You didn't answer my question about the difference between conscious and unconscious either. In every normal case of those words, we would say that what is qualitative can be received unconsciously, but what is qualia is what is received consciously. Are we saying then an unconscious being has qualia? A P zombie would be completely qualitative right? It would have to see and act upon different stimuli. If you start to say that qualitative processing is also qualia, then is a P zombie a conscious being? Because we would be saying there is something it is like to have such in and of itself.

If qualitative experience is qualia, then it is a part of qualia. If I agreed with you, in our conversation then its pointless to note what is qualitative and what is not. My reasoning about qualia would still be "the experience from the subject", and you already said that we can match the brain to qualitative experience. Which means we've now associated brain states directly with subjective experience. If it can observe, identify, and this is confirmed in its actions, we just say its a qualitative analysis or objective consciousness that doesn't concern itself with any other type of qualia.

This is a very real problem you'll need to address Bob. If there's no difference between qualitative and qualia beyond qualitative being a specific type of qualia, then it doesn't disprove my argument. The "subjective consciousness" of higher qualia that you note would still just be qualia. If the qualitative is just a form of qualia, brain scans can explain qualitative actions, therefore qualia.

Quoting Bob Ross

You switched the terminology mid-argument here: the first sentence is about “consciousness” in the sense of qualitative experience—i.e., qualia—and the second was about mere observance/awareness.

I don't think I switched terminology here. I divided consciousness between the subjective and objective, but they are descriptor of the totality of consciousness as it is generally used today. "Consciousness" as a whole contains both the subjective and objective aspects. Objective consciousness is the expression of the actions that something subjectively experiences. The objective is simply what we can scientifically observe and conclude, while the subjective is impossible to know.

Quoting Bob Ross

If you are going to say we can evaluate “objective consciousness”, in the manner you have described, then you can’t equally claim that that gives us insight into “subjective consciousness” which is what you would need to prove “subjective consciousness” is caused by brain states.

Objectively, subjective consciousness is explained by brain states. That we are certain of. Just go back to my brain surgery example. What we cannot know, is what that subjective experience is like from my viewpoint. Objectively, it doesn't matter exactly what the subject is experiencing from its perspective. If the person states they see a tree, we don't need to know exactly how they subjectively experience a tree to believe they see a tree right?

I'll give you another example, a car. We see that a car runs. When we look under the hood we see an engine. How does it move? Gas burns and some weird thing happens that turns the engine. Later we find out its the combustion of gas that leads to magnetism. How does magnetism work? Well... we don't fully know. Its kind of a mystery really. Does that negate that the truck is ultimately run by magnetism, even though we don't understand why exactly magnetism actually works? No.

Quoting Bob Ross

What I mean by “cause” is the actual reductive explanation of phenomena and not necessarily a physical chain of impact. So, for me, “impact” and “cause” are two different things.

Sure, lets for now say they don't need a physical impact. But in the case of the brain, it is physical, and it impacts consciousness. Therefore consciousness is caused by the physical brain. The clarification does not negate that. Now if you want to speculate that something else besides the brain causes the mind, we can look at that. I'm not saying the brain is necessarily the only cause.

Quoting Bob Ross

My problem is that you seem to be claiming that “objective consciousness” and “subjective consciousness” are two sides of the same coin, and the side we see is just relative to our epistemic access

Yes.

Quoting Bob Ross

but by this “objective” observation of “consciousness” we gain absolutely no insight into the being also qualitatively experiencing

Correct.

Quoting Bob Ross

there is a disconnect there in your argument. When I refer to “consciousness”, I am talking about that private qualia that we definitely cannot empirically observe (which I think you are agreeing with me here) and this has no connection to an empirical merely observation of a being observing, identifying, and acting upon its environmen

Incorrect, but by just a tweak of wording. Yes, the act of knowing what it is like for another being to be subjectively conscious is unknowable. We can know what its like for ourselves of course. As I've noted, we are incredibly close on our analysis. I think its just a few syntax and definition differences.

We know that as subjectively conscious beings, there are certain actions which we can only do while conscious. So first we define consciousness. I noted it was the ability to observe/experience and identify. I cannot know what exactly another being subjectively experiences while its observing and identifying, so it cannot be part of my definition of consciousness in regards to other beings. But I can know that only a being which can experience and identify can make certain actions. If a being makes those particular actions that require it to observe and identify, then objectively, I can note they are conscious.

Subjective consciousness is for ourselves. It is our personal understanding that it is possible to have a state of experience subjectively. But objectively, no one can ever know that experience, and we cannot know theirs. Can we know they are conscious by their actions? Yes. That is objective consciousness. The analysis of subjective consciousness is a belief system. It is not objective.

Did you know some people cannot visualize in their mind Bob? Its just dark when they close their eyes. Unless they told you, you might never figure it out. Even then, I can't actually know what not being able to visualize is like. I can make conjectures and beliefs, but it is outside of my personal knowledge. Does that mean that I can know people claim they cannot visualize? Yes. Can we make objective tests that a person who can visualize would pass while a person who cannot visualize can fail? Yes.

Its like truth Bob. We can never know the truth. The truth is what is. But can we set up a logical system of deduction called knowledge that works for us in objective society? Of course. Does that fact that we cannot directly know the truth invalidate knowledge as a useful tool? No. Does the fact that we can never know what is true negate the knowledge of the identity of truth as a concept? No. Same with an objective consciousness and its relation to the subjective mind.

Can we doubt that when we know something, it isn't true? Of course. Does doubt alone negate knowledge? The idea that we are being manipulated by an evil demon or are brains in a vat? No, you know this. An objective consciousness is what is within our capability of knowledge. Same with the concept of a subjective consciousness. Does pointing out that because we cannot know what it is like for another being to be subjectively conscious change anything about our objective conclusions? No.

To negate the knowledge that the brain causes subjective consciousness Bob, you have to have more than a doubt. More than a, "But it doesn't quite answer everything." Doesn't matter. All of our knowledge that we hold can be criticized in this way. We may wonder at the mystery of magnetism on the quantum level, but we still use it objectively to power our cars. As well, your own assessment is not free of this criticism either. If you claim brain states do not cause subjective consciousness, you have to combat modern neuroscience and medicine, which holds this to be known. This requires a replacement.

What does your replacement offer? If brain states do not cause consciousness, then what have we been doing wrong all these years in medicine? It is not your notion that we cannot know exactly what it is like to be a subjective being that I disagree with. It is the idea that because we do not, we have to throw away all the other objective knowledge we've accumulated. This knowledge does not make claims about the exact subjective experience of an individual, so where is the logic in throwing it away?

There must be more than doubt, or skepticism, or the idea that our current knowledge cannot identify or understand certain aspects of reality. We must offer an alternative that gives us something better than the current system. I asked this a while back and I'll ask again. What do you hope to get out of your system? I can invent the idea that an evil demon controls all of our actions, but it cannot be proved, so what does it do for us in reality?

Quoting Bob Ross

What you are referring to, I think, is our ability to affect consciousness with what looks like from our perceptions as physical objects (e.g., popping a pill to get rid of my headache, cutting part of a brain off and observing the person’s personality change, etc.). This doesn’t mean that we have a reductive, conceptual account of brain states producing mental states. Within my perspective, popping a pill is just an extrinsic representation of mentality: the pill doesn’t fundamentally exist as something physical.

No, the pill is physical because it fits the terms of what physical means. The pill is an identity with a particular set of essential properties. It matches those properties in reality, therefore we know it as a pill. We use the identity of "physical" to represent reality, and our analysis of reality works. Everything is matter and energy, so far that's held. If someone pops a rock instead of a pill, it doesn't matter that they identified and believed the rock to be a pill, its not going to have the same effect. Again, this is general knowledge Bob. You can't come to it and start saying things like "it looks like from our perceptions". If we go that route, we don't have knowledge. And if we don't have knowledge, any system goes. And if any system goes, people are going to choose the system that works in reality, not yours.

"All of existence consists,it is claimed,solely of ideas—,emotions,perceptions,intuitions,imagination,etc.—even though not one’s personal ideas alone."

I did look up the paper, and wanted to point this summary out. Bob, we've already discussed knowledge before. This author is a person who clearly does not understand knowledge. Knowledge and personal experience consists of all of these things. Yet reality is ultimately what all of these are tested against. I can have a dream that I can fly, but when I awake and imagine myself flying, I can't do it in reality. We've discussed this at length in the past, so I do not feel the need to revisit it. His theory is a theory we can invent, but a theory that fails when tested against reality. I will not debate this point as a courtesy since we already have before. This may be a point in which we agree to disagree here. If this is a key point of difference between what is stated here, then we will not be able to continue the conversation. I still have full respect for your thought process, passion, and intelligence, it is just something we have already explored at length.

Quoting Bob Ross

I'm not sure what you mean by "mind-independent". The brain and the mind are one.

Not quite. Either the brain produces the mind, and thusly the mind is an emergent property thereof (and so they are not one and the same) or vice-versa.

Let me clarify then, a "living brain" and the mind are one. A dead brain of course produces nothing. But a living brain which fires synapses and has a subjective experience is the mind. Beyond the science of "death", You can do an experiment to confirm this. Note where your consciousness is in your body. Now move to a new location. Does your consciousness move with you? Can you by concentration extend your consciousness out past your body to where you were? I know I'm unable to. Therefore the only reasonable conclusion is that consciousness follows physical movement, and is therefore subject to physical reality. It is located at a particular physical location. With our scientific understanding of the brain, the only reasonable conclusion is that physical location is the brain. I am open to hearing reasonable alternatives.

Quoting Bob Ross

The point is it is logically consistent to hold that matter and energy can create consciousness internally.

Something being logically consistent doesn’t make it true in metaphysics nor science: idealism and physicalism are both logically consistent.

That's an avoidant answer Bob. I don't hold to idealism and physicalism because I often find they are summary identities that are not logically consistent when examined in detail. Unless you can show me why its not logical to hold that matter and energy can create consciousness internally, you do not have a logical argument yourself. You either need to present a logical alternative, which I have not seen so far, or demonstrate where my logical claim fails explicitly.

Quoting Bob Ross

Being able to associate people’s mental activity with brain states doesn’t prove in itself that the latter causes (i.e., reductively explains) the former: you keep bringing up examples of this as if it does prove it. Why do you think it proves it?

Its not "associate", its real claims of knowledge and science. If you deny this, then once again we're going to have to agree to disagree here. I've given plenty of examples in neuroscience and medicine. I have yet to hear any counters to them besides an insistence its just a correlation. You need to prove they are correlations, not causations, and you have not done so. Expressions of doubt just aren't enough.

Quoting Bob Ross

Think of lower-life forms, like squirrels: they don’t self-reflectively know (cognitively) that there is something it is like to see from there eyes nor that they qualitatively experience in general. According to your definition, then, one would likewise have to have the over-and-above cognitive abilities to gain self-knowledge of one’s qualia, which is different than the qualia itself.

According to our discussion of qualia, it is not simply self-reflectiveness. It is the experience of the subject itself. Self-knowledge of qualia is a higher consciousness, but unnecessary to be conscious. If a thing experiences and identifies, it has consciousness. You seem to be implying that only meta-consciousness is consciousness. But its not, its why we note "meta". A squirrel likely may not be able to evaluate its own qualia. That has nothing to do with being conscious at the most basic level.

Quoting Bob Ross

But the cogitated “2+2=4” or “I am seeing the color red” are self-reflective notions of the qualia--they are not the qualia themselves.

Self-reflection is also qualia. I don't understand how its not. You even noted that qualitative processing is qualia, so why is this all of the sudden not qualia? On your next pass, lets see if we can really clearly identify what qualia is as a unique identity that does not have these inconsistencies or questions.

Quoting Bob Ross

I view the term "metaphysical" as its most base definition. "Analysis of the physical"

This isn’t what metaphysics means: it is the “study of that which is beyond the possibility of all experience”.

The word includes "meta", which essentially means, "about the subject", and the subject is physics, or the physical. Physical in later years has been replaced with "experience", but metaphysics always refers to what is real. It is about taking the real and identifying it in a way that we can logically process. For example, "Gravity pulls everything together", is a metaphysical description of the math and science of gravity. But it relies on there actually being the math and science of gravity. Metaphysics that does not rely on existence or reality isn't metaphysics. Studying what is beyond the possibility of reality is not metaphysics, but speculation and imagination.

Regardless of your definition, the underlying meaning is all that matters. I am discussing matters of experience. Anything that cannot be experienced, is outside of what can be known. Anything outside of what can be known is speculation, and while fun, is pointless to debate the veracity of any one speculation over another.

Finally,
Quoting Bob Ross

No, objectivity is something that can be logically concluded to the point that any challenge against it fails. A falsifiable claim that cannot be shown to be false essentially.

What do you mean by “logically concluded to the point that any challenge against it fails”? Do you mean logical necessity?

I would say that objectivity is that which its truthity is will-independent.

Also, “a falsifiable claim that cannot be shown to be false” is a contradiction in terms. If it is falsifiable, then it is possible to shown to be false, whereas an unfalsifiable claim is something which cannot be shown to be false.

Objectivity is deduction that is not contradicted by reality. Going back to a long ago conversation, applicable knowledge. if we don't want to go down that road again, the closest view would be scientific laws and tested theories.

As for falsifiable, all falsifiable means is that we can imagine a situation in which a claim could be false. For example, "I will be at a dinner at 2pm". Its falsifiable in the fact that there is a state in which I am not at the dinner at 2pm." But if I am indeed at a dinner at 2pm, my statement cannot be shown to be false. Apologies for the unclear sentences there.

A good deep dive again Bob! I now these replies are getting long again. I'll try to pare down the next reply.

Quoting Patterner

To think the brain does not cause consciousness is to invalidate decades of working science and medicine.
— Philosophim
That answers the question of Where. My question is of How. How do the physical processes that explain our senses, and our behaviors resulting from the signals our senses send to the brain, also aware at different levels? These physical processes are doing two things at once, and one of them isn't physical. And the one that isn't physical isn't necessary.

Its all matter and energy Paterrner. I already covered that with Bob in my last reply, so feel free to sort through to that section. If my reply to Bob doesn't fully answer your question, feel free to ask again.

Quoting Philosophim

Its all matter and energy Paterrner. I already covered that with Bob in my last reply, so feel free to sort through to that section. If my reply to Bob doesn't fully answer your question, feel free to ask again.

Let me try to explain my thinking this way... It we saw a skyscraper made entirely of liquid water, we would look for something else going on. Because the properties of liquid water cannot account for the characteristics of a skyscraper.

The properties of matter and energy are even farther removed from the characteristics of consciousness than liquid water from skyscrapers. At least water and skyscrapers are both physical objects, composed of primary particles.

Water and skyscrapers are also closer to flight, though flight is a process, rather than an object. Because flight is a physical process. We can see how flight takes place due to the physical macro characteristics of various physical things; that these physical things are comprised of the primary particles; and how the properties of the primary particles make it possible for them to make the physical things.

I do not see an attempt to explain how the characteristics of consciousness that are not physical things or processes can arise from physical things and processes. It is less logical than building skyscrapers out of water. The fact that there is, clearly, a connection between consciousness and the brain, and consciousness would not exist without the brain, doesn't mean that, when we ask how physical building blocks can lead to non-physical properties, we should settle for the answer "It just does." We should look for what else is going on, as we would for a water skyscraper.

Quoting Patterner

The properties of matter and energy are even farther removed from the characteristics of consciousness than liquid water from skyscrapers. At least water and skyscrapers are both physical objects, composed of primary particles.

I've never understood this thinking. Every animal living thing is matter and energy. Many living things have consciousness at a basic level. Therefore matter and energy can be conscious. Why deny what's in front of your eyes?

Quoting Philosophim

Many living things have consciousness at a basic level. Therefore matter and energy can be conscious.

But this begs the question - it assumes what needs to be proven. At issue is the claim that organisms can be understood solely in terms of matter and energy, or physics and chemistry. But this is a contentious claim. What if there is something about even the very simplest forms of organic life that is not observable in inorganic matter? What if organism have attributes that are not reducible to physics and chemistry?

To quote a biology article on the topic:

Quoting What is Information?

The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions, and this is equivalent to saying that there is no fundamental divide between life and matter. This is the chemical paradigm, a view that is very popular today and that is often considered in agreement with the Darwinian paradigm, but this is not the case. The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life—biological information and the genetic code—that are totally absent in the inorganic world, which means that information is present only in living systems, that chemistry alone is not enough and that a deep divide does exist between life and matter. This is the information paradigm, the idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’.

Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of Biological Thought, p. 124, he made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’

---

Quoting Philosophim

I feel this also fixes ideas that observation or subjective consciousness creates all of reality. Subjective consciousness creates a subjective reality. Subjective reality does not alter objective reality. Whether you define that material in front of you as a rock or not, that material is still there. They each have their uses, but one does not affect the other.

But this overlooks the role of the observer in physics. This shows that the act of observation and the establishment of measurement outcomes seem to play a fundamental role in determining the observed properties of the objects of the analysis, which are, purportedly, also the fundamental particles of physics. This connection between observation and the physical world suggests that the attempt to explain everything solely in terms of physical entities and processes - matter~energy, in other words - is insufficient in accomodating or accounting for the role of the observer.

This is what gave rise to physicist John Wheeler's theory of the 'participatory universe', in which our participation as observers is as essential to the nature of the Universe as are the objects of analysis. So that torpedoes any neat separation of the objective and subjective poles. But that, in any case, is also called into question by 'enactivism', which shows that the organism and environment (or subject and object) are 'co-arising', such that it is impossible to draw an ultimate dividing line between one and the other.

Quoting Wayfarer

But this begs the question - it assumes what needs to be proven. At issue is the claim that organisms can be understood solely in terms of matter and energy, or physics and chemistry. But this is a contentious claim. What if there is something about even the very simplest forms of organic life that is not observable in inorganic matter? What if organism have attributes that are not reducible to physics and chemistry?

There's not question being begged here. Doubt or skepticism alone does not refute what is known. Its the old "evil demon" argument Wayfarer. What if everything you know and understand is being manipulated by an evil demon? What if there's something we don't know?

That's always the case. What ifs, imagination, and maybe's are always second class citizens to known facts. Now if something legitimate is found, for example a new energy, matter, or substance, then of course we have a valid question to look into. You must ask the question, then provide something tangible to look into. Is there anything in the universe besides matter and energy? No.

Quoting What is Information?

The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions, and this is equivalent to saying that there is no fundamental divide between life and matter.

Largely, there's only a slight difference between life and matter, its true. We have this human centric way of looking at things and sometimes forget we are not special or separate from the rest of reality. I've described life like this: Life is a set of chemical reactions and processes that actively acts to keep its processes going. Contrast this with baking soda and vinegar. The reaction doesn't seek out new baking soda or vinegar, it just reacts and is done. Life is a fantastic delicate balance of all these reactions that seek self-sustainment when the process is about to run out of energy.

Quoting What is Information?

The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life

I'm ok with this definition. Once again though, DNA is just more matter and energy. I would argue this is organic life, as I believe we could create an inorganic system of life with AI. I have no issue with expanding the definition to be "matter and energy that can hold and process information".

Quoting What is Information?

Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter.

Nothing wrong with that either. We can define life as we see fit, then apply it across matter and energy. But it does not negate that life is still just matter and energy. Beyond the need to feel unique, there is no evidence of any kind that life is not matter and energy.

Quoting Wayfarer

But this overlooks the role of the observer in physics. This shows that the act of observation and the establishment of measurement outcomes seem to play a fundamental role in determining the observed properties of the objects of the analysis, which are, purportedly, also the fundamental particles of physics.

This is a largely misunderstood understanding of quantum physics. Our "observations" are bouncing light particles and photons off of other smaller particles. We read the "bounce" like we do with light, hearing, and everything else, but our actual measurement alters the course of the particles we are tracking. Depending on what we're trying to track with the bounce, we can know one state, but not the other state. It is not that fact that your eyeballs are in the direction of light that quantum outcomes are altered. Its fun science fiction, but not reality.

Quoting Wayfarer

This is what gave rise to physicist John Wheeler's theory of the 'participatory universe', in which our participation as observers is as essential to the nature of the Universe as are the objects of analysis. So that torpedoes any neat separation of the objective and subjective poles. But that, in any case, is also called into question by 'enactivism', which shows that the organism and environment (or subject and object) are 'co-arising', such that it is impossible to draw an ultimate dividing line between one and the other.

Now this I like! I agree with this entirely, but perhaps the conclusion may differ from what you're proposing. I wrote a paper that Bob Ross and I had a lengthy conversation over that does somewhat question the neat separation between objective and subjective, but salvages it. Too dense to go into here! At a very basic level, subjectivity is the ability to experience. We can create identities, then attempt to apply them to reality. Those identities that can co-exist without contradiction by reality become objective. Its too dense to get into here, so if you want to make a point, please go to that article, "A theory of knowledge".

Again, our mere presence of having ears and eyes does not alter reality, well beyond being in the way of light and sound like anything else. But, our active measurement can very well affect the reality of the situation then if we never measured it at all. In cases in which our measurement is relatively low mass and energy, the affect to the object being measured is negligible. But in the cases like the quantum realm, its like slinging a que ball at an eight ball.

Further, because we have the capability to identify, we can determine what type of matter and energy is important. Without an identifier, sheep, clouds, and grass would still exist. But there would never be an aspect of reality outside of those identities, that could identify them in a particular way. Our ability to identify, the existence of living brains, creates an interaction with reality that could not happen with a simple reacting object. We are most certainly not apart from reality, but one expression of matter and energy within it that causes a unique type of identity and interaction from anything else.

Quoting Philosophim

I've never understood this thinking. Every animal living thing is matter and energy. Many living things have consciousness at a basic level. Therefore matter and energy can be conscious. Why deny what's in front of your eyes?

I do not deny it. I have gone to lengths, with my words and with Nagel's, to make clear that it seems obvious that matter and energy are conscious. Our consciousness is not separable from our brain.

However, some aspects of consciousness do not seem to be explainable by what we have learned about the properties of particles, the forces we are aware of, and how they all interact. I have not heard a theory that attempts to explain how those properties and forces can explain those characteristics. The stance seems to be an unspoken "They just do."

Quoting Philosophim

Doubt or skepticism alone does not refute what is known.

It is not something known, but something assumed by you. You assume that it is scientifically established that matter~energy is the only true existent.

Quoting Philosophim

it does not negate that life is still just matter and energy.

It is exactly what is called into question by that article. It is saying, there is a capacity or attribute which cannot be accounted for by physics and chemistry, namely, information. There's a well-known aphorism by one of the founders of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, to wit, 'information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.'

Quoting Philosophim

in the cases like the quantum realm, its like slinging a que ball at an eight ball.

[quote=Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos]The explanation of uncertainty as arising through the unavoidable disturbance caused by the measurement process has provided physicists with a useful intuitive guide as well as a powerful explanatory framework in certain specific situations. However, it can also be misleading. It may give the impressions that uncertainty arises when we lumbering experimenters meddle with things. This is not true. Uncertainty is built into the wave structure of quantum mechanics and exists whether or not we carry out some clumsy measurement[/quote]

Quoting Philosophim

one expression of matter and energy

An assumption again. You know about the 4% universe, right? So it seems that the current model of physics does not account for 96% of the total matter-energy of the Universe. You might say, well, it might be a previously-unknown type of matter-energy - but if it's unknown, then it is not encompassed by our current understanding of matter~energy. It might turn out not to be physical at all, or to be so radically different from known physics that it upends our ideas of what is physical (per Hempel's Dilemma).

Quoting Patterner

it seems obvious that matter and energy are conscious.

That is panpsychism, which seeks to resolve the apparently inexplicable nature of consciousness by saying it is elementary, in the same sense that the physical attributes of matter are. As you then correctly observe there are aspects of consciousness that are external to the models of physics. That is the subject of philosophy of mind, in particular, and there are many involved in trying to come up with a theory.

Quoting Patterner

However, some aspects of consciousness do not seem to be explainable by what we have learned about the properties of particles, the forces we are aware of, and how they all interact. I have not heard a theory that attempts to explain how those properties and forces can explain those characteristics. The stance seems to be an unspoken "They just do."

Sure, we don't know everything yet. Just like we don't know how quantum physics fully works. Doesn't mean we can't take what we do know and work with it from there. Doesn't mean that we don't understand the part of quantum physics that we do. Subjective states are internal, whereas we measure externally. If we could one day measure something internally, perhaps? Or its just something that isn't possible. We don't have to know everything about component parts to use the parts that we do know.

Quoting Wayfarer

Doubt or skepticism alone does not refute what is known.
— Philosophim

It is not something known, but something assumed by you. You assume that it is scientifically established that matter~energy is the only true existent.

Wayfarer, matter and energy is the only true existent that we know of. Please show me someone who knows of something that exists besides matter and energy. You're evil demoning it up here! :)

Let me rephrase it thus: We know that sometimes what we conclude as knowledge can be changed at a future date with new discoveries or thinking. We also know that sometimes what we conclude as knowledge is not changed with new discoveries or thinking. Therefore what is known today, could be known tomorrow, or change. But the fact that we do not know what tomorrow will bring does not negate what we know now.

Show me knowledge today of something that exists that is not matter and energy. If you do that, then I will concede. If you cannot, then my point stands.

Quoting Wayfarer

It is exactly what is called into question by that article. It is saying, there is a capacity or attribute which cannot be accounted for by physics and chemistry, namely, information.

That's just silly. Obviously DNA is matter and energy, and honestly it is a storage of information. So is the brain. So is your hard drive. Do we think that a fly or a roach is something magical because it can retain information? Even plants do. Viruses. There are tons of example of matter and energy that store information. Its just your perspective. We mistake our awe of the magic reality for something that is separate from reality itself.

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos:However, it can also be misleading. It may give the impressions that uncertainty arises when we lumbering experimenters meddle with things. This is not true. Uncertainty is built into the wave structure of quantum mechanics and exists whether or not we carry out some clumsy measurement

Viable and predictable uncertainty comes about two ways. By our measurement's effects, and our inability to measure. Any uncertainty by wave math that does not rely on the former is due to the later. A wave function is formed as a mathematical concept to deal with our inability to get a fine tune. Its like Newtonian physics versus relativity of large objects. Newtonian physics works at certain scales, but larger scales require us to add in variables we could eliminate as insignificant. Quantum mechanics is a theory full of probabilities, possiblities, and poor measurement, and yet its been brilliantly put together to the point we can create reliable cell phones.

This is because science understands well you can't wait to understand everything before applying what you do know. Carefully applying what we can be certain of in quantum mechanics, including the certainty of uncertainty, allows us to create a theory which works in many applications. Our lack of understanding everything about it does not negate what we do know about it.

Could we one day find something in physics that changes our entire outlook? Of course. Does that mean we discard what we know today? No. Quoting Wayfarer

it seems obvious that matter and energy are conscious.
— Patterner

That is panpsychism, which seeks to resolve the apparently inexplicable nature of consciousness by saying it is elementary, in the same sense that the physical attributes of matter are.

I did not say anything about panpsychism. I don't care for broad theories that don't make any sense, nor care to be attributed to them unless without my explicit consent. I never said consciousness was elementary. Consciousness arises when a particular combination of matter and energy produces what we identify as consciousness. Think of water. Its a Hydrogen and two Oxygen atoms. Separate, they express completely differently then if we combine them together in a particular fashion. We don't blink at that utter, inconceivable, mind blowing magic, and yet we blink at consciousness? Why? Every single existent thing is a marvel of impossiblity that it exists, and yet it does. Why is consciousness suddenly an exception?

Just like not all combinations of matter and energy create water, not all combinations of matter and energy create consciousness. Water is not elementary, and to my mind, I cannot see consciousness as elementary either.

Quoting Wayfarer

As you then correctly observe there are aspects of consciousness that are external to the models of physics. That is the subject of philosophy of mind, in particular, and there are many involved in trying to come up with a theory.

Certainly, but unless the theory is testable and objective, its conjecture. The philosophy of mind is not going to solve this without being lock step in with neuroscience. It is not going to come up with anything new if it proposes the idea that consciousness does not come from matter and energy, when that is all we clearly know. Anyone can come up with a "what if". Great philosophy comes up with, "What is".

Quoting Philosophim

Wayfarer, matter and energy is the only true existent that we know of.

Says who? Quote a source for that. [s]See, what you always argue is basically 'materialism 101'. Then you are exasperated that it can be questioned, when it seems so obvious.[/s]

Quoting Philosophim

the fact that we do not know what tomorrow will bring does not negate what we know now.

It might completely revolutionise it. If we were having this discussion in 1620, you would be utterly convinced that the Earth stands still and Sun goes around it. If we were having it in 1840, you would know nothing about electromagnetic fields.

Quoting Philosophim

A wave function is formed as a mathematical concept to deal with our inability to get a fine tune.

The ontological status of the wave-function is one of the great unanswered questions of modern science and philosophy. If you google the phrase, science disproves objective reality, you will find many discussions of the radical implications of this idea.

Quoting Philosophim

Obviously DNA is matter and energy, and honestly it is a storage of information. So is the brain. So is your hard drive. Do we think that a fly or a roach is something magical because it can retain information? Even plants do. Viruses. There are tons of example of matter and energy that store information.

It is precisely the ability of living material to store information and to adapt to the environment, that marks it off from inorganic matter, such as crystals or plasma. It is not 'just silly' but fundamental distinction, the subject of the comment I provided above from a reputable biological scientist.

Quoting Wayfarer

Wayfarer, matter and energy is the only true existent that we know of.
— Philosophim

Says who? Quote a source for that. See, what you always argue is basically 'materialism 101'. Then you are exasperated that it can be questioned, when it seems so obvious.

I'm not exasperated Wayfarer, you're the one stamping down on the stone here (Callback! I liked that story.). You agree that its materialism 101, so you know all the evidence. If you want to challenge it, go ahead. Its on you, not me to disprove. Provide me evidence of something that exists that is not matter and energy, and we have a discussion. If not, I'm right. I don't have to prove that the evil demon doesn't exist, you have to prove it does.

Quoting Wayfarer

the fact that we do not know what tomorrow will bring does not negate what we know now.
— Philosophim

It might completely revolutionise it. If we were having this discussion in 1620, you would be utterly convinced that the Earth stands still and Sun goes around it. If we were having it in 1840, you would know nothing about electromagnetic fields.

Of course. We could only know what we knew then. Suppositions are great for exploration, and questions are always needed. But do you know how many other proposals there were that also weren't correct? Some people thought the world existed on the back of a turtle. We don't countenance ideas that do not have anything substantial to them that add to what we can know. My problem is not with the idea that there might be more than matter and energy in the universe. Sometimes I feel you don't catch that in our discussions. Its your insistence that there is something beyond matter and energy without actual evidence.

Quoting Wayfarer

A wave function is formed as a mathematical concept to deal with our inability to get a fine tune.
— Philosophim

The ontological status of the wave-function is one of the great unanswered questions of modern science and philosophy. The fact that you think you can sweep it aside with a sentence speaks volumes.

This is not a counter. This is a statement from a person that suddenly realized they got into territory they weren't familiar with. It was also more than one sentence, many of which you did not address. If it was so easy to discount my hand waving, why didn't you do it? Educate me, don't insult me because all that tells me is you don't actually have anything substantial to say.

Quoting Wayfarer

If you google the phrase, science disproves objective reality, you will find many discussions of the radical implications of this idea. And they are radical - far more so than you're apparently aware of.

Ah, there we go again with the condescending insults. Apparently I'm not aware of them. Without checking with me, you just assume I'm some plebe beneath you eh? You didn't even bother to link a specific paper and use it to make a point.
I've been in a lot of debates over the years Wayfarer. Did you mean this one? https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/ Supperposition, quantum entaglement? Spooky action at a distance? Even if I wasn't familiar with these concepts, how would I ever know how you thought these concepts countered my point? Not a very good argument.

I've respected you Wayfarer. I've always asked you your viewpoints, asked you to clarify, give evidence, etc. instead of simply dismissing you. Because I might learn something from anyone. You see Bob Ross here? The first time he replied to me in a thread it was a wall of text. I had to paste it into word and spent time spacing the paragraphs out so I could read it. And you know what? It was brilliant. If I had simply looked down on Bob without giving him a chance like you seem so willing to do with me here, I would have missed engaging with one of the most brilliant, insightful, and thoughtful people on this board. (Sorry if I embarrassed you Bob)

I wouldn't be this direct normally, but I hold you in higher regard than snippy insults and then leaving. Am I wrong? I took a rain check discussing this topic because we were in Bob's thread. I'm cashing that check Wayfarer because this is my thread. You in, or out?

Quoting Philosophim

However, some aspects of consciousness do not seem to be explainable by what we have learned about the properties of particles, the forces we are aware of, and how they all interact. I have not heard a theory that attempts to explain how those properties and forces can explain those characteristics. The stance seems to be an unspoken "They just do."
— Patterner

Sure, we don't know everything yet. Just like we don't know how quantum physics fully works. Doesn't mean we can't take what we do know and work with it from there. Doesn't mean that we don't understand the part of quantum physics that we do. Subjective states are internal, whereas we measure externally. If we could one day measure something internally, perhaps? Or its just something that isn't possible. We don't have to know everything about component parts to use the parts that we do know.

That's all entirely true. That is the state of our understanding of consciousness. When we have two different things, such as objective and subjective, outer and inner, physical and mental, or any A and B, we should not assume that understanding and having explained A is the same as understanding and having explained B. And we should not claim that, by talking about A, we are talking about B.

Quoting Philosophim

I hold you in higher regard than snippy insults and then leaving.

OK, I appreciate that, and I apologise for it. I will explain myself further. As I see it, scientific or philosophical materialism is the predominant outlook of many educated members of today's culture. When it is described as 'materialism' it seems pejorative, because that term also refers to 'an unhealthy obsession with material goods and status'. But that's not what I am referring to. The kind of materialism I'm referring to is the attitude, characteristic of modern scientific cultures, that the only real constituents of existence are those that can be described in terms of matter and energy. And that is what you're proposing - you state it outright in any number of posts. That is what is at issue. OK, I acknowledge, it 'pushes buttons' in my case, hence my snippy tone. I'll try and refrain from that in future.

But leaving that aside, I've provided a number of counter-arguments, but you don't recognise or respond to them - you simply brush them aside, as per this exchange:

Quoting Philosophim

Many living things have consciousness at a basic level. Therefore matter and energy can be conscious.

To which I responded that 'this begs the question'. Then you said

Quoting Philosophim

There's not question being begged here. Doubt or skepticism alone does not refute what is known.

I'm pointing out that the assumption that organisms can be understood in solely physical terms is the point at issue. In other words, I'm saying it isn't known. You're assuming that organisms can be accounted for solely in terms of matter-energy, and brushing off a reasoned argument (illustrated with references), which calls this into question. That's what 'begging the question' means.

So we then get to:

Quoting Philosophim

Provide me evidence of something that exists that is not matter and energy, and we have a discussion.

I mentioned already the aphorism that 'information is information, not matter or energy'. So, do you think that is wrong? Do you think that Ernst Mayr's assertion that the genetic code cannot be accounted for in terms of matter and energy, but implies something over and above them, is also wrong? I provided both of those as examples, and you haven't discussed them or even acknowledged them, beyond saying 'it's kind of silly'. Because you already know (or think you know) that 'everything is matter-energy', then you're dismissing any counters to that, without really presenting an argument.

Finally, the point I made about the difficulty of establishing what exactly is objective reality, according to quantum physics, was given as a response to your assertion in the OP that:

Quoting Philosophim

Subjective reality does not alter objective reality.

This is precisely what the measurement problem in quantum physics calls into question.

Quoting Philosophim

Educate me...

See Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar

Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science, David Lindley

These are popular books that lay out some of the philosophical issues of physics. Notice the sub-titles!

Quoting Patterner

When we have two different things, such as objective and subjective, outer and inner, physical and mental, or any A and B, we should not assume that understanding and having explained A is the same as understanding and having explained B.

I agree. But we can still know of A and B, and not fully knowing B does not negate what we fully know of A.

Quoting Wayfarer

OK, I appreciate that, and I apologise for it

Water under the bridge. I've had my bad days, thanks for staying. :) You're a good person Wayfarer.

Quoting Wayfarer

I'm pointing out that the assumption that organisms can be understood in solely physical terms is the point at issue. You're assuming that organisms can be accounted for solely in terms of matter-energy, and brushing off a reasoned argument (illustrated with references), which calls this into question. That's what 'begging the question' means.

My attempt was not to ignore this point, I still don't see from my view how I'm begging the question. If I had said something like, "Ice cubes are cold because they are ice", yeah, that would definitely be on me. I'm not saying it is truth that everything in the universe is made out of matter and energy. I'm stating everything that we know of in the universe is made out of matter and energy. To me that's the same as saying, "Ice cubes are known to be made out of H20 that is at a temperature below 32 degrees F." Maybe the reality is that its not. But that's what we know today.

Knowledge is not the same as truth. Going with your example, it used to be known that the Sun rotated around the Earth. I mean, it would be obvious right? You look up in the sky and there it goes! If someone came along and said, "Actually, we rotate around the Sun", that person might be ridiculed, even though what they said was true.

I'm no stranger to ideas that challenge the status quo. As such, I don't dismiss or ridicule new ideas. The point I've been trying to convey is that I'm very open to the idea that we rotate around the Sun, but there has to be some evidence for it. I'm very open to the possibility that there is more than matter and energy in the universe. Correct me if I'm wrong Wayfarer, but it seems your assertions are that this must be true. To me that's different from it could be true.

So if you claim is that there is more to the universe than matter and energy as an assertion, I'm looking for evidence or proof of that assertion. Its not to belittle the idea, its to see if there is something behind it more than doubt or speculation. Its not an assumption that everything in the universe that we know of is made up of matter and energy, its currently a fact. Facts can be wrong, but they need other facts to challenge them.

Quoting Wayfarer

I mentioned already the aphorism that 'information is information, not matter or energy'. So, do you think that is wrong? Do you think that Ernst Mayr's assertion that the genetic code cannot be accounted for in terms of matter and energy, but implies something over and above them, is also wrong? I provided both of those as examples, and you haven't discussed them or even acknowledged them, beyond saying 'it's kind of silly'.

Sure, my apologies if I was too short in analyzing your point. I believe his assertion that information is more than matter and energy is wrong. DNA is made up of matter and energy. All life is made up of matter and energy and stores information. Computers are matter and energy, and they store information. Its wonderous that matter and energy can do so, and honestly makes me want to go down other speculative paths about reality.

Now is it possible that information could be more than matter and energy? Sure, I'm definitely open to it. But if the claim is to be more than speculation, it needs a few good points to back it. For example, does the current model of matter and energy have weaknesses, failings, and inadequacies. Most certainly! To my mind, there is not a single system invented by humanity that explains the world that we can't find issues with. Even math, what we would consider the gold standard! So I am listening and considering challenges to the current matter and energy model with seriousness.

Back to the point of "information" being something different from matter and energy. One criticism I can definitely get behind is that it is difficult to explain information in terms of matter and energy. It would be like me explaining how to start your car by using quantum theory. Quantum theory is fantastic and explains a lot of things, but its pretty worthless in explaining how to start your car. Does explaining that you need a key to insert and turn it an invalidation of quantum mechanics though? No. Does quantum mechanics invalidate the need for a better model of communication to explain how to start your car? No here as well!

In my readings of challenges to a matter and energy or a physicalist model, it seems to me many think that a problem with the current model or the introduction of a new model somehow invalidates the old model. This is where I'm looking for evidence, and so far have not seen it. Can we make an information model of reality and apply it to dna? It might be fantastic to do so and allow us to communicate in new ways with new ideas. But does that invalidate that dna is also made up of matter and energy? No.

Its really the core issue Bob and I are debating right now. Bob wants to claim that consciousness cannot come from the brain, whereas we know it does. I'm very open to there being something new introduced, or even seeing how a new model of understanding mind apart from the brain might be more useful to us then using the brain model alone. But at the end of the day, if there is a claim the old model is simply wrong, it needs to show where it is wrong in its realm of knowledge by demonstrating evidence of contradiction, and a replacement that fixes it.

Quoting Wayfarer

Subjective reality does not alter objective reality.
— Philosophim

This is precisely what the measurement problem in quantum physics calls into question

My point was that a "wave" in math is not he same as a wave in the ocean. I've waded into mathematical terminology before, and often times English is an attempt to convey what the math is saying, but often times is interpreted much more literally to our understanding of the terms than their mathematical meaning.

For example, particle and wave do not mean that particulate matter stops being particulate matter. Particle math is useful for straight line mathematical assessments. So for example you fire a ball from a cannon, you treat it as a "particle". Wave math is about a mathematical distribution of odds when a straight path is not certain. Electrons are not the solid orbits of the Bohr model, but constantly "buzzing". As such, it becomes more mathematically accurate if when we move an electron that we calculate the probability that this "buzzing" will affect the final outcome. This is most readily communicated as a "wave" or predicted high and low outcomes based on the limits of probable possibilities from the "buzz".
This is why you can treat an electron like a wave or a particle. It all accounts on what you're doing to the electron, and what you're trying to measure.

My point is that our subjective reality of whether we treat the electron as a wave or a particle does not alter reality, it just alters are mathematical predictive or post assessment models. Having our eyeballs focused in the direction of a particle does not change its behavior. Our eyes are just receptacles, they do not affect reality outside of this receipt. Blasting particles with another type of particle to measure it at the quantum level however distorts the outcome.

Here's a good summary of the issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem

If you read, you'll notice when they're talking about the collapse of the wave theory into classical particle mechanics, they're trying to figure out why and how exactly that math occurs. Decoherence theory sums it up best for me.

"As it is well known, [many papers by Bohr insist upon] the fundamental role of classical concepts. The experimental evidence for superpositions of macroscopically distinct states on increasingly large length scales counters such a dictum. Superpositions appear to be novel and individually existing states, often without any classical counterparts. Only the physical interactions between systems then determine a particular decomposition into classical states from the view of each particular system. Thus classical concepts are to be understood as locally emergent in a relative-state sense and should no longer claim a fundamental role in the physical theory."

Put in layman's terms, it is more of a natural state for there to be probabilities within matter and energies' next predicted movement. Instead of X energy at Y velocity = Z location every time, the reality is more =Z+ or - 2. Only by the relative interaction of object forces can classic particle type analysis be viewed. So when we take a dense cannon ball and fire it from a cannon, the natural state is truly that of a wave. The cannonball, unlike the classical particle model, will not travel exactly X feet at a exactly the angled arc of the cannon. But, the variation may be so insignificant for our purposes, that a classic particle model is all we need for the accuracy we desire.

Finding the exact relative situation that causes wave collapse, or essentially gets rid of the probabilistic + or -2 wiggle, is a very real challenge at the sub atomic level. There may be impacts in our measurements that suddenly resolve the predicted outcomes of a probabilistic wave into closely resembling a particle model. So while we might expect, due to probability, that a particle could end its path within this variance of outcomes, oddly it more often then not acts like the limits of its possible variants do not exist, or mostly lands on just z, and can be treated as a particle.

None of this changes the idea of what is subjective or objective, at least to my understanding of the definitions. If you could explain why you think they negate subjective and objective outlooks, I would love to hear it. I do appreciate the links Wayferer, but they aren't access to the books themselves. While they may be interesting reads, is there something I can read more immediately to contribute to the conversation at this time?

Reply to Janus

Hello Janus,

I think it all depends on what you mean by "qualitative seeing". People with colour agnosia can "guess" with not perfect, but greater than random accuracy, what colour card is being held before their eyes, for example. They are not actually aware of seeing the colour, but that greater than random accuracy of guessing shows that the data which would normally produce an experience of colour is registered by the brain and can be more or less reliably accessed even though the conscious qualitative experience is absent.

I would say that they are still seeing the colour card, to some degree, if they can accurately guess them; and the fact that sometimes they can’t means that they no longer have introspective access to those qualitative experiences.

By “qualitatively seeing”, I mean something which is not-quantitative (viz., it has no definite quantity) and there is something it is like to see in and of itself.

My point is that I would not refer to the brain's mere registration of the data as qualitive experience or seeing. If you don't agree, then all we will be arguing about is terminology, and there cannot be a definitive right answer. So, I'm saying that to me, it makes no sense to speak of qualitive experience in the absence of awareness of that experience.

I think you are conflating consciousness proper with meta-consciousness: there can be a qualitative experience and something it like in and of itself to see of which the person, as the ego, does not have introspective (or perhaps cognitive) access to.

Conscious modeling is conceptual modeling made possible by re-cognition. We say things have qualities because we recognize similarities. Take red as an example; we call red things red because they look similar to one another, and there is a great range of different red. But on either side towards yellow and blue we reach points where we would say a thing is orange or mauve or purple.

I see: is this like our ability to self-reflective on our perceptions? Is that what you are saying?

Bob

Quoting Philosophim

When we have two different things, such as objective and subjective, outer and inner, physical and mental, or any A and B, we should not assume that understanding and having explained A is the same as understanding and having explained B.
— Patterner

I agree. But we can still know of A and B, and not fully knowing B does not negate what we fully know of A.

(FYI, I added the sentence "And we should not claim that, by talking about A, we are talking about B." after you had hit Quote.)

I may be misinterpreting, but it seems to me that, every time I ask about B, you give me an explanation of A, and say you are giving an explanation of B.

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

Let me clarify my terminology with more technical verbiage as, although I do think we are progressing, I think we are (1) using the terms differently and (2) our usages thereof still contain nuggets of vagueness.

Also, you brought up some good points, and I just wanted to recognize that: you are genuinely the only other person on this forum that I have discussed with that forces me to produce razor thin precision with my terminology—and that is a good thing! The more rigorous the discussion, the better the views become.

To better relate the terms together, in contradistinction to how you use them and to shed light on some of the issues I have with your view, I am going to revert back to ‘qualia’ being best defined as ‘instances of qualitative experience’; but by ‘qualitative experience’ I would like to include in the definition the property of there being ‘something it is like to have it in and of itself’.

I think this fits more what I am trying to convey, as I think you are thinking that ‘qualitative experience’ and ‘qualia’ are two separate things: the former being non-quantitative experience and the latter being a ‘mental event whereof there is something it is like to have such in and of itself’. Consequently, I think you view the hard problem as pertaining to the latter and not the former; whereas, I am trying to convey that the hard problem pertains to both.

Within my terms, non-quantitative experience (i.e., the experience of qualities) is necessarily coupled with the property of there being something it is like to have it in and of itself. For you, I think your argument only works if you deny this claim.

If I see something qualitatively (viz., non-quantitatively), then I would say that there is necessarily something it is like in and of itself to see that something (in that manner as a stream of qualities). So, to clarify, ‘qualia’ is just an instance of a stream of qualities that we experience which we nominally single out to meaningfully navigate our lives; and the experience of the stream of qualities has of its own accord the property of something it is like to have such. For me, the qualitative seeing of the green apple is inextricable from there being something it is like to qualitatively see the green apple: I anticipate you denying this claim.

In terms of ‘sensations’, I only hold they are qualitative if we are talking about a fundamentally qualitative world, which would entail a mind-dependent world, and not a mind-independent one. If we are talking about a world that is mind-independent (such as being fundamentally matter and energy) then I think, to be consistent to that view, there are fundamentally no qualities: it only exists with the emergent property of our minds from our brains. Our nerves, for example, although from our qualitative experience seem to be gathering qualitative senses, are really taking in objectively quantifiable measurements—there’s no quantities there.

In terms of ‘perceptions’, I am still referring to our mind’s (or I think in your case: our brain’s) interpretation of those sensations (which are quantitative or qualitative depending on the aforesaid factors).

By “consciousness”, then, I am referring to ‘qualitative experience’ which, I will stress, includes the property of ‘there being something it is like to have such in and of itself’.

You didn't answer my question about the difference between conscious and unconscious either.

I apologize: I must have forgotten! By “unconscious”, I mean something which is not ‘qualitatively experiencing’ (e.g., a camera taking in light and processes the environment in the form of a picture).

In every normal case of those words, we would say that what is qualitative can be received unconsciously, but what is qualia is what is received consciously.

Agreed, because “consciousness” colloquially is used very loosely. However, I must stress that there is nothing qualitative (in terms of sensations) being received by your body (and ultimately processed by the brain) if the brain is producing the mind: the qualities that you observe are soley within your conscious experience as an emergent property of a quantitative brain and body. The world, according to that view, and correct me if you disagree, would be purely ontologically quantitative. The qualities simply aren’t there—they only exist within the emergent minds.

Are we saying then an unconscious being has qualia?

I think my attempt to refurbish the terminology created some confusion: I apologize. To answer: no. An unconscious being is purely made up of quantitative, physical stuff and never comes in contact with qualities.

A P zombie would be completely qualitative right? It would have to see and act upon different stimuli. If you start to say that qualitative processing is also qualia, then is a P zombie a conscious being? Because we would be saying there is something it is like to have such in and of itself.

I am saying that the PZ doesn’t qualitatively experience and its sensory inputs do not take in qualities—it is quantitative through and through; and, consequently, there is nothing it is like in and of itself for its experiences.

and you already said that we can match the brain to qualitative experience. Which means we've now associated brain states directly with subjective experience. If it can observe, identify, and this is confirmed in its actions, we just say its a qualitative analysis or objective consciousness that doesn't concern itself with any other type of qualia.

Saying we can “match” and “associate” brain states and mental states doesn’t mean that the former produces the latter. When you say we can tell objectively that a being observes, identifies, and acts upon its environment, you are describing a quantitative being through-and-through (or at least that is the conceptual limit of your argument: it stops at identifying Pzs)--not any sort of qualitative experience.

I think if you are going to claim there is a bridge between “objective” and “subjective” conscious, then you will have to prove that the former gives us knowledge of a being qualitatively experiencing as opposed to merely observing, identifying, and acting.

So, in short:

Objectively, subjective consciousness is explained by brain states.

You have an explantory gap between the objective and subjective aspects, since objectively you are only talking about quantitative measurements and nothing qualitative. The hard problem is about how we have qualities at all that get produced by the brain, and an inextricable aspect of that is that the streams of qualities have in and of itself something it is like to have such.

This is a very real problem you'll need to address Bob. If there's no difference between qualitative and qualia beyond qualitative being a specific type of qualia, then it doesn't disprove my argument. The "subjective consciousness" of higher qualia that you note would still just be qualia. If the qualitative is just a form of qualia, brain scans can explain qualitative actions, therefore qualia.

I am not saying that qualitative experience is a type of qualia. And to clarify this, let me start here:

Self-reflection is also qualia. I don't understand how its not

Self-reflection, such as introspection and cognition, are also qualia; but my point was that the self-reflective thought “I am seeing the color red” is not the same as the qualia it is referencing, which is what I thought you were talking about. They are both a part of qualitative experience. Likewise, I was trying to note (way back when) to the fact that having a qualia in the form of a thought does not mean that you are qualitatively experiencing qualitative experience: it doesn’t double up like that (which is what you were saying about meta-consciousness). Meta-consciousness is a higher order aspect of consciousness which isn’t required to say that a being is qualitatively experiencing.

Again, I am as of yet to hear a proof from you, scientific or othewise, that “brain scans can explain qualitative actions”. Scientifically, the explanations of actions are quantitative.

Objective consciousness is the expression of the actions that something subjectively experiences

So far, I would say this is an assumption under your view. If it is not, then please provide a proof. I failing to see how the exact same expression of actions, which are supposed to be quantitative (as your qualitative experience of other peoples’ actions do not matter: they are in your head only), could not be a PZ.

Objectively, it doesn't matter exactly what the subject is experiencing from its perspective. If the person states they see a tree, we don't need to know exactly how they subjectively experience a tree to believe they see a tree right?

This is partly why I like my original definition of qualia, because I think you are conflating the hard problem with only what is it like to have qualitative experience in and of itself, when you can’t likewise even prove qualitative experience itself by virtue of the brain.

Does that negate that the truck is ultimately run by magnetism, even though we don't understand why exactly magnetism actually works? No

The problem, as I outlined in my proof, is that it is provably impossible to prove brain states produce mental states, so this is disanalogous. I agree with you here though (in terms of the actual example you gave).

But in the case of the brain, it is physical, and it impacts consciousness
…
No, the pill is physical because it fits the terms of what physical means.

It is important to note that the ‘physical’ brain and pill you are describing is only within your qualitative experience: you will have to prove abstractly that there is also a mind-independent (i.e., physical) pill and brain. I am of yet to hear a proof of this.

Its like truth Bob. We can never know the truth. The truth is what is

We can come to understand different things that pertain to the truth. Truth is just a relationship between thinking and being. I can know that 2 + 2 = 4 or a = a and that is a part of ‘the truth’.

Did you know some people cannot visualize in their mind Bob?

My point is not that we simply haven’t been able to prove consciousness arises from the brain nor that we simply cannot come to understand what it is like to have qualitative experience: I am saying you can’t prove the brain produces qualitative experience.

More than a, "But it doesn't quite answer everything." Doesn't matter.
…
There must be more than doubt, or skepticism, or the idea that our current knowledge cannot identify or understand certain aspects of reality.

This is just a straw man of my position. I am not invoking a ‘in-the-gaps’ or ‘from ignorance’ kind of argument: I already provided a proof that reductive naturalism cannot account for qualitative experience:

The form is as follows: “consciousness is [set of biological functions] because [set of biological functions] impacts consciousness [in this set of manners]”. That is the form of argumentation that a reductive naturalist methodology can afford and, upon close examination, there is a conceptual gap between consciousness being impacted in said manners and the set of biological functions (responsible for such impact) producing consciousness

What does your replacement offer? If brain states do not cause consciousness, then what have we been doing wrong all these years in medicine?

Medicine is unaffected by whether the brain produces consciousness.

"All of existence consists,it is claimed,solely of ideas—,emotions,perceptions,intuitions,imagination,etc.—even though not one’s personal ideas alone."

I did look up the paper, and wanted to point this summary out. Bob, we've already discussed knowledge before. This author is a person who clearly does not understand knowledge

I don’t see how the quote you gave of him demonstrates that he doesn’t know what knowledge is.

Knowledge is not the testing of our dreams in comparison to reality, if that is what you are trying to claim. Under idealism, the ‘objective’ world is fundamentally ‘subjective’ in the sense that is mind-dependent: that doesn’t mean we can just whimsically make up what is true of reality and what isn’t.

Now move to a new location. Does your consciousness move with you? Can you by concentration extend your consciousness out past your body to where you were?

This doesn’t prove that the brain produces consciousness: this is expected under my view as well because the brain is a (parital) extrinsic representation of my mind. This just doesn’t matter if you can’t float outside of your body at will.

Therefore the only reasonable conclusion is that consciousness follows physical movement,

Consciousness doesn’t follow physical movement: it is the necessary preconditions of experiencing a physical world.

I would imagine that you hold that our dreams are purely within our minds (and not ‘of reality’). Have you ever had a vivid dream where you assume a conscious character within it? That ‘physical’ world, even by your lights, is obviously not actually physical (fundamentally). Now imagine that I told you that your conscious experience in that dream world was ‘following you as a physical being in it’--you would rightly point out that the conscious experience, being a dream and all, is the primary precondition for the experience of the physical dream world.

No different with reality for all intents and purposes.

That's an avoidant answer Bob. I don't hold to idealism and physicalism because I often find they are summary identities that are not logically consistent when examined in detail.

I don’t think I avoided anything: a view being logically consistent doesn’t make it cogent to hold as true. I can make any view, if you give me long enough time (depending on how absurd it is), logically consistent. Logical consistency is just about not having any logical contradictions which only pertains to the form of the argument.

Unless you can show me why its not logical to hold that matter and energy can create consciousness internally,

And this is why I brought it up: I don’t need to prove that. I agree that it is logically consistent: so is mine! Logical consistent is a basic prerequisite for candidate metaphysical theories: it doesn’t mean much beyond that. In other words, it isn’t saying much to be logically consistent (although that is a good thing).

You either need to present a logical alternative, which I have not seen so far, or demonstrate where my logical claim fails explicitly.

A logical alternative of what exactly? My purpose with the hard problem was to refute the positive claim that it is emergent from the brain—I haven’t explained my alternative view yet. I can if you would like.

Its not "associate", its real claims of knowledge and science.

It being real claims of science doesn’t mean it isn’t a proof of association.

A squirrel likely may not be able to evaluate its own qualia. That has nothing to do with being conscious at the most basic level.

Agreed! This was my point with the blindsight person! They are conscious, they have qualia and qualitative experience, but they don’t understand self-reflectively that they do.

The word includes "meta", which essentially means, "about the subject", and the subject is physics, or the physical.

For now, I think it is best to agree to disagree on what metaphysics means.

I am discussing matters of experience. Anything that cannot be experienced, is outside of what can be known.

This doesn’t work. To be brief, by your lights, we cannot know that “every change has a cause”, that “88888888888888888 + 2 = 88888888888888890”, or that ‘a = a’. You will never prove that empirically.

This is getting long, so I will stop here. I look forward to hearing from you,
Bob

Quoting Philosophim

My point is that our subjective reality of whether we treat the electron as a wave or a particle does not alter reality, it just alters are mathematical predictive or post assessment models

I know we're probably both out of our depth here, but I think you're incorrect about that. It's not as if you can state that a particle really exists irrespective of whether it has been observed or not. If it were as simple as you say it is, then there would be no 'interpretation problem' in the first place. I think the approach of Bohr was to say that it was pointless or impossible to say what the 'object' 'really is', apart from the act of measurement. Again your presumption of the reality of the object conditions your analysis - you presume that the object exists independently of any act of measurement, when that is precisely the point at issue! As for decoherence, the Wiki article you point to says 'Quantum decoherence does not describe the actual collapse of the wave function, but it explains the conversion of the quantum probabilities (that exhibit interference effects) to the ordinary classical probabilities.' The 'collapse of the wave function' is not at all a resolved issue.

As far as readings are concerned, try A Private Vew of Quantum Reality, Chris Fuchs, co-founder of Quantum Baynesianism (QBism). Salient quote:

Those interpretations (i.e. Copenhagen, Many Worlds) all have something in common: They treat the wave function as a description of an objective reality shared by multiple observers. QBism, on the other hand, treats the wave function as a description of a single observer’s subjective knowledge.

So it's right on point with the question of subject-object relations.

Quoting Philosophim

I believe his [i.e. Norbert Wiener's] assertion that information is more than matter and energy is wrong. DNA is made up of matter and energy. All life is made up of matter and energy and stores information.

Again, your dismissal is simplistic. How DNA came into existence is still not something known to science. The fact that living things are able to maintain homeostasis, heal from injury, grow, develop, mutate and evolve into new species, all involve processes and principles that may not be explicable in terms of physics and chemistry, as there's nothing in the inorganic domain.

Could I also recommend you have a glance at The Natural Attitude, which I think is the basis of what you're writing.

That's all for now. Thanks for your responses.

Quoting Bob Ross

Let me clarify my terminology with more technical verbiage as, although I do think we are progressing, I think we are (1) using the terms differently and (2) our usages thereof still contain nuggets of vagueness.

Yes, a good idea. I think I'm going to spend the time really getting into qualia vs quantitative experience as I think that's the crux of where a lot of arguments go. Quoting Bob Ross

Also, you brought up some good points, and I just wanted to recognize that: you are genuinely the only other person on this forum that I have discussed with that forces me to produce razor thin precision with my terminology—and that is a good thing! The more rigorous the discussion, the better the views become.

You as well Bob! It forces me to be clearer, and I think despite whether we agree at the end or not, it forces both of us to be better philosophers. I always enjoy your points, it is fun to be made to think. :)

Quoting Bob Ross

I am going to revert back to ‘qualia’ being best defined as ‘instances of qualitative experience’; but by ‘qualitative experience’ I would like to include in the definition the property of there being ‘something it is like to have it in and of itself’.

I feel your definition is not concise enough to give a clear and unambiguous identity. "something it is like to have it in and of itself" is too many words. I can't make sense of it. I'm trying though. In trying to pare the words down I start with "something it is like to have it", and I'm still not quite sure here. If I look at "In and of itself", that seems similar to "experience unidentified". So if I'm seeing, I'm not trying to describe or identify what I'm seeing, I'm just in the moment per say.

If that's the case, then I can combine this into "Something it is like to have experience". Something can be separated into some thing, which I think can be translated to, "What it is like to have experience". Now, I'm not saying that was your intention, but it was the closest I could get to with the definition.

Quoting Bob Ross

I think this fits more what I am trying to convey, as I think you are thinking that ‘qualitative experience’ and ‘qualia’ are two separate things: the former being non-quantitative experience and the latter being a ‘mental event whereof there is something it is like to have such in and of itself’.

What I was noting is that there didn't seem to be a discernible difference between qualitative experience and qualia. If my pared down definition of "What it is like to experience" works, then this fits. The hard problem would apply to both in my view. If my pared down definition is also correct, I see no reason for the terms qualitative and qualia. They're the same thing in regards to the assessment. Or so I thought until I read this:

Quoting Bob Ross

So, to clarify, ‘qualia’ is just an instance of a stream of qualities that we experience which we nominally single out to meaningfully navigate our lives; and the experience of the stream of qualities has of its own accord the property of something it is like to have such.

I tried to pare this down again. "Qualia is just a stream of qualities that we experience. This is not just any experience though, but experience that we nominally single out to meaningfully navigate our lives".

First, what does "nominally single out" mean? Do we give attention to certain experience over others? So if I'm not paying attention to something in the corner of my eye, is this not qualia? If so, what is it? Or is this about definitions/identities we create out of the stream of experience we have? So for example I say, "That's a TV", because that's meaningful to me in my life.

I then tried to pare down the second sentence. "The experience of qualia has of its own accord, what its like to experience." or "Qualia is what its like to experience". Is this right?

This leaves me now with a question of what quantitative experience is. I'm going to confess something. Words which have the first few letters the same as another are something my brain easily mixes up. I looked back briefly and am not sure that I did not accidently do that between the words quantitative and qualitative. It is something I've worked on a long time, but I still slip up occasionally.

So I want to bring back the discussion to quantitative for a second. If a quantitative experience is an experience, is there something that has that experience? For lack of a better term, this would be an "unconscious experience"? In the case of blindsight, the person would unconsciously see the object, but has no actual qualia, or conscious experience of doing so. I believe this is what you confirmed, but I'm making sure. If so I am fairly certain I had the two terms crossed in my head unknowingly as I was writing them, and most definitely recant that you had a problem in your qualitative/qualia comparison.

Quoting Bob Ross

When you say we can tell objectively that a being observes, identifies, and acts upon its environment, you are describing a quantitative being through-and-through (or at least that is the conceptual limit of your argument: it stops at identifying Pzs)--not any sort of qualitative experience.

Yes, I agree with this fully.

If I understand your definitions correctly, then you and I don't disagree. Qualia/qualitative experience is simply subjective consciousness while quantitative analysis is simply objective consciousness. There's really no difference between them. "Quantitative experience" is essentially unconscious experience. If so, then you agree with my division between objective and subjective consciousness as a viable means to assess consciousness. Let me translate my argument to yours so you can see.

Qualia (Subjective consciousness) can be neatly described as, "The viewpoint of consciousness itself".

Quantitative analysis (Objective consciousness) occurs when we can know that something that is not our qualia is also experiencing qualia with identification. The problem in knowing whether something is qualitatively conscious is that we cannot experience their qualia. So the only logical thing to do is to observe what a quantitative consciousness does that only an observing and identifying thing could do.

Quantitative consciousness then requires the addition of one other term, "Action". Only through a thing's actions can we ascertain that it can observe and identify. Combine baking soda and vinegar together and it merely "reacts". Its a simple chemical process with no means of control, identification, or observation. Chemicals collide and results happen.

So there we go, in the end we went about defining a few terms which are semantically no different from one another. :)

I'll stop it here and confirm with you if this is a good breakdown of your definitions. If so, then I'll address the second half.

Quoting Bob Ross

I would say that they are still seeing the colour card, to some degree, if they can accurately guess them; and the fact that sometimes they can’t means that they no longer have introspective access to those qualitative experiences.

By “qualitatively seeing”, I mean something which is not-quantitative (viz., it has no definite quantity) and there is something it is like to see in and of itself.

The reflected light still enters the eyes, stimulates the rods and cones, leading to neural signals travelling to the brain and stimulating the visual cortex, but there is no subjective awareness of seeing. All those processes I just outlines are quantitative processes, equivalent in a way to the operation of a camera. You can keep asserting that it is the case that there is qualitative seeing, but I'm not seeing any explanation from you that could convince me of that.

Quoting Bob Ross

I think you are conflating consciousness proper with meta-consciousness: there can be a qualitative experience and something it like in and of itself to see of which the person, as the ego, does not have introspective (or perhaps cognitive) access to.

No, I'm simply referring to the normal ability to be aware of what we are seeing or have seen and we are by no means aware of most of the potential visual data that is being received by the eye. There is no reason to think that there are not many things in your visual field right now that you are not aware of at all, even though the light from those things is being reflected into your eye and neural signals are being received by your visual cortex. I don't think it makes any sense at all to call all that visual data we are not aware of "qualitative seeing".

Quoting Bob Ross

is this like our ability to self-reflective on our perceptions?

We can be self-reflective on the small percentage of the overall visual data we have been consciously or unconsciously aware of. The rest has not been noticed in the first place and is lost forever I would say. In the person with visual agnosia, there is no conscious awareness of seeing, even though some data may have been unconsciously registered by the brain. That data enables the person to guess with somewhat greater accuracy than random guessing as to what that data is, but since there is no recall at all the experience os seeing I just don't see any way in which it could make sense to call it qualitiative.

Quoting Wayfarer

I think the approach of Bohr's was that it was pointless or impossible to say what the 'object' 'really is', apart from the act of measurement.

I agree completely with you.

Quoting Wayfarer

Again your presumption of the reality of the object conditions your analysis - you presume that the object exists independently of any act of measurement, when that is precisely the point at issue!

I would say this another way. Obviously there's something there to measure. If not, we wouldn't get a measurement. What we do with measurements is create identities. Identities are fully shaped by us. There is nothing within reality that insists that anything must be identified in any particular way. However, in relation to ourselves, certain identities end up being more useful than others. In general, the most useful identities are those which have a clear difference in behavior than the existence around it.

A sheep eats grass for example. There is nothing in reality apart from our observation that necessitates that we identify the sheep and the grass as separate. We could just as easily group the sheep and the grass together. If then we can identify anything in whatever way we want, why do so? Because it turns out reality exists independently of our identities. If I think that rotten looking apple is healthy to eat, it makes me sick. If I identity a 40 foot drop as save to jump down to, I die. So how do we decide what identities work? We decide based on whether reality contradicts them or not.

I could go much more in depth with this in my theory of knowledge paper, you might actually like the ideas contained within. Long story short, we believe our identities represent something in reality as reality will prove us wrong otherwise. In the case of the quantum realm, we're in a serious case of not being able to accurately measure reality. We're working with what we have, which is a lot of probabilities.

Quoting Wayfarer

As for decoherence, the Wiki article you point to says 'Quantum decoherence does not describe the actual collapse of the wave function, but it explains the conversion of the quantum probabilities (that exhibit interference effects) to the ordinary classical probabilities.' The 'collapse of the wave function' is not at all a resolved issue.

If you read my conclusions again you'll see I concluded this as well.

Quoting Wayfarer

As far as readings are concerned, try A Private Vew of Quantum Reality, Chris Fuchs, co-founder of Quantum Baynesianism (QBism). Salient quotes:

Those interpretations (i.e. Copenhagen, Many Worlds) all have something in common: They treat the wave function as a description of an objective reality shared by multiple observers. QBism, on the other hand, treats the wave function as a description of a single observer’s subjective knowledge.

Yes, but we must be very careful not to translate this into the common meanings of the terms. Notice he's looking at the function, or the identity. Unlike bouncing light off of a sheep, bouncing particles off of quantum particles is going to affect the outcome. If the observation impacts the object, then of course the observation and the object are intertwined. If I push a sheep over for fun, then say, "The sheep will objectively fall over at this spot when someone touches it," that doesn't work objectively. If you touch the sheep with X force at Y velocity at Z location, then the outcome will happen.

A problem with quantum measurement is the sheep is constantly moving, writhing like a mass of worms, and we're trying to aim and hit the same spot every time without anyway to confirm exactly where we hit it. We can't. Don't take the analogy too literally, its just an easy thought comparison. It doesn't meant the sheep wouldn't fall over if the same exact force were applied in the same exact location and all of its internal forces were known. Quantum mechanics doesn't half of that to make a repeatable objective outcome. At best, it has to analyze the limits of possibilities, very much like chaos theory.

The entire point behind all of this conjecture really, is that identities don't create reality, reality impacting other reality is the reality. And sometimes the only identity which can be made is the identity of a reality impacting another reality. It doesn't mean that we cannot identify much of reality without changing it. Eyes are passive receptors of light bouncing off an object. Whether we are here or not, that light is affecting the object in the same way.

Quoting Wayfarer

I believe his [i.e. Norbert Wiener's] assertion that information is more than matter and energy is wrong. DNA is made up of matter and energy. All life is made up of matter and energy and stores information.
— Philosophim

Again, your dismissal is simplistic. How DNA came into existence is still not something known to science.

Simple does not mean wrong Wayfarer. In fact, it is my experience the best way to explain complex things is to put many simple things together. Don't mistake my notion that everything being matter and energy explains how something came to be. I don't know if you are a religious person, but none of my arguments refute the notion of a God or some creator. If your hope is that somehow getting away from physicalism saves God, I wouldn't. You can very much argue for a creator or God through the idea that there is a reality independent from us. In fact, I think its far easier. And if you're not a theist, no matter. It just seemed an odd thing to point out when I had never implied that we actually knew how DNA came into being.

Quoting Wayfarer

The fact that living things are able to maintain homeostasis, heal from injury, grow, develop, mutate and evolve into new species, all involve processes and principles that may not be explicable in terms of physics and chemistry, as there's nothing in the inorganic domain.

To your earlier point Wayfarer, the "organic domain" is just an identity. While you may find some use in creating such a domain, there is nothing in reality that necessitates such an identity be apart from your world view. A more objective measure is to realize that the "organic domain" is simply when matter and energy behave in a different way. As I noted earlier, matter and energy create water. Think of lava, or complex crystal caverns. Why should any of that exist? Its magic. Same with life. Life is just yet another expression of matter and energy in particular combinations. You see some special difference, but I don't. Its all part of the wonderful reality of existence, something that has no right or reason to exist in the first place.

I much appreciate the link, its a good refresher on Husserlian phenomenology. I have my own theory of identity and knowledge I wrote here some time again. Here's a rewrite in which I greatly simplify the original that Bob and I poured over for almost a year. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context

Good thing I looked to, I had a reply and never saw it until now. :(

This is the original with Bob and I. It might be worth while if you have questions, you can read our back and forth. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9015/a-methodology-of-knowledge

Reply to Philosophim
Hello Philosophim,

I feel your definition is not concise enough to give a clear and unambiguous identity. "something it is like to have it in and of itself" is too many words. I can't make sense of it.

No worries. You can think of it like this:

So if I'm seeing, I'm not trying to describe or identify what I'm seeing, I'm just in the moment per say.

The sense of sight (as a qualitative experience) has something it is like in and of itself. In other words, even if I don’t understand that I am qualitatively seeing, there is still something it is like for me to be qualitatively seeing.

"What it is like to have experience". Now, I'm not saying that was your intention, but it was the closest I could get to with the definition.

I think for now this is ok, but I have a feeling I may end up disagreeing depending on how you tie it to the blindsight example.

What I was noting is that there didn't seem to be a discernible difference between qualitative experience and qualia.

The only difference is that the qualia is the instance of it:

I tried to pare this down again. "Qualia is just a stream of qualities that we experience. This is not just any experience though, but experience that we nominally single out to meaningfully navigate our lives".

In other words, your qualitative experience is really a steady flow of experiences with no distinct boundaries between them; and you single out, or carve out, experiences to compare to others nominally. For example, you get a cut and feel the pain, but that feeling of pain isn’t truly separable from your vision that you are having at the time, your thoughts, etc.--it is a steady stream of them all globbed together. Nevertheless, it is certainly meaningful to focus on the pain and try to come up with a solution to resolve it—but the qualitative pain is a part of a mush of a steady stream of qualitative experience. Does that make sense?

Do we give attention to certain experience over others?
…
Or is this about definitions/identities we create out of the stream of experience we have?

I would say both. We have the ability to focus our attention and cognitively assess our experiences, and those are likewise experiences of their own. When we focus on the pain, or we assess “that we are in pain” (as a thought), we are singling out a portion of a inextricable whole of qualitative experience.

"Qualia is what its like to experience". Is this right?

I would say that “there is something it is like to qualitatively experience, and qualia are the singled-out instances thereof (e.g., the feeling of pain)”. I think that’s generally what you are trying say here, but I wanted to be clear.

This leaves me now with a question of what quantitative experience is. I'm going to confess something. Words which have the first few letters the same as another are something my brain easily mixes up. I looked back briefly and am not sure that I did not accidently do that between the words quantitative and qualitative. It is something I've worked on a long time, but I still slip up occasionally.

Absolutely no worries my friend!

So I want to bring back the discussion to quantitative for a second. If a quantitative experience is an experience, is there something that has that experience? For lack of a better term, this would be an "unconscious experience"?

There is nothing it is like to have unconscious experience because it isn’t qualitative; and I think this is where we begin to disagree. You would say that a camera + AI (or what have you) has something it is like to be it, but to me that is only the case with qualitative experience—instances of which are qualia.

Think of it this way, although a crude and oversimplified example, if you flick a domino to start a 1,000,000 domino chain of them hitting each other one-by-one, there is nothing it is like to be those dominos hitting each other. They just hit each other: they are unconscious.

An “unconscious experiencer”, like an AI, is just a more complex version of this: it is mechanical parts hitting each other or transferring this or that—it is quantitative through-and-through just like the domino’s hitting each other. There is nothing it is like to be an AI in the sense like there is something to be like a qualitative experiencer: qualia (in the sense of instances of qualitative experience) have a “special” property of there being something it is like to be it (or perhaps to have it).

In the case of blindsight, the person would unconsciously see the object, but has no actual qualia, or conscious experience of doing so.

In terms of my view, I disagree. The blindsight person still qualitatively experiences (in this case sees) but they have lost the extra ability to understand that they are experiencing. Just like a squirrel, there is still something it is like to view the world through their experiential, qualitative sense of sight. Under my view, they don’t need to the extra cognitive or introspective access to their qualitative experience to be classified as qualitatively experiencing.

Under your view, I think you are saying that they have lost their qualitative experiencing, which I am not following why you think that. But that is what I am understanding you to be saying.

Qualia/qualitative experience is simply subjective consciousness while quantitative analysis is simply objective consciousness. There's really no difference between them

I was so close to agreeing with you here! But the last sentence through me off: there’s a big difference between them. If objective consciousness gives you only knowledge of quantitative experiencers, then you have no reason to believe that they have qualitative experience like yourself. That’s what I meant by there being no bridge between these two concepts of yours whereof you could safely connect them as two epistemic sides of the same coin.

Likewise, if you can’t know anything about other people than objective consciousness, then you are admitting that you cannot resolve the hard problem: you cannot reduce your own subjective consciousness to the quantitative brain because that requires the same objective consciousness inquiry that you agree only gets you to a PZ. So you can’t account for your subjective consciousness as reducible to some sort of objective consciousness.

Also, it wouldn’t make sense (to me) to try to reduce the quantitative to the qualitative, but that’s what is required if you are going to claim that subjective consciousness is produced by the brain.

Here’s where I get confused. You first agree with me that you can’t account for any sort of qualitative experience about other people:

When you say we can tell objectively that a being observes, identifies, and acts upon its environment, you are describing a quantitative being through-and-through (or at least that is the conceptual limit of your argument: it stops at identifying Pzs)--not any sort of qualitative experience. — Bob Ross

Yes, I agree with this fully.

And then immediately thereafter say:

Quantitative analysis (Objective consciousness) occurs when we can know that something that is not our qualia is also experiencing qualia with identification.

If you actually agree that your objective analysis of consciousness doesn’t provide insight into qualitative experience, then you can’t know that other people (through identification) are also experiencing qualia.

The problem in knowing whether something is qualitatively conscious is that we cannot experience their qualia.

And here is the conflation: again, there is a difference between not knowing their qualia (i.e., knowing how they experience their qualia) and knowing that they experience qualia. You can’t prove either of those, and sentences like the above quote make me think that you think the hard problem only applies to the former.

Quantitative consciousness then requires the addition of one other term, "Action". Only through a thing's actions can we ascertain that it can observe and identify

I don’t have a problem with using action, identification, and observance to determine if something is unconsciously experiencing: but this says nothing about “consciousness” in the sense of qualitative experience, and that’s all that matters for the hard problem.

So there we go, in the end we went about defining a few terms which are semantically no different from one another. :)

We are definitely getting closer, that is for sure (;

Bob

Reply to Janus

Hello Janus,

The reflected light still enters the eyes, stimulates the rods and cones, leading to neural signals travelling to the brain and stimulating the visual cortex, but there is no subjective awareness of seeing.

I don’t see, upon looking at the empirical experiments of blindsight people, why one would conclude that they no longer qualitatively experience. Just because they don’t identify as seeing doesn’t mean that they aren’t still having it.

All those processes I just outlines are quantitative processes, equivalent in a way to the operation of a camera. You can keep asserting that it is the case that there is qualitative seeing, but I'm not seeing any explanation from you that could convince me of that.

To me, long story short, I believe that other people are typically qualitatively experiencing and unless there’s evidence that a given person isn’t having that then I default to saying they do. Kind of like how I believe that everyone (that is a live) has a beating heart, and unless there’s evidence that a given person doesn’t then I default to saying they do.

Yes you can account for awareness with such quantitative processes, but you can’t quantitatively account for qualitative experience, which to me is “consciousness”, and so I think your approach is flawed. I don’t think you should be metaphysically viewing the scenario as if their qualitative experience is reducible to a quantitative brain.

There is no reason to think that there are not many things in your visual field right now that you are not aware of at all, even though the light from those things is being reflected into your eye and neural signals are being received by your visual cortex. I don't think it makes any sense at all to call all that visual data we are not aware of "qualitative seeing".

This is what I was referring to: qualitative experience is not only what ‘bubbles up’ to the ego. Take breathing: even if you didn’t have introspective access to your experience of your breathing (because you weren’t focusing on it), that doesn’t mean that you aren’t still qualitatively experiencing the breathing.

We can be self-reflective on the small percentage of the overall visual data we have been consciously or unconsciously aware of

Then you agree that qualitative experience (i.e., consciousness) extends beyond what we can self-reflect upon and introspectively access?

but since there is no recall at all the experience os seeing I just don't see any way in which it could make sense to call it qualitiative.

This doesn’t work: think of a squirrel. It has virtually 0 introspective and self-reflective access to its own qualitative experience: is it thereby not qualitatively experiencing? Of course not! The squirrel cannot recall its experiences of seeing—does that mean it isn’t experiencing qualitatively? Of course not!

Introspective and self-reflective access are extra aspects of consciousness and do not belong to concsiousness proper.

Bob

Quoting Bob Ross

Think of it this way, although a crude and oversimplified example, if you flick a domino to start a 1,000,000 domino chain of them hitting each other one-by-one, there is nothing it is like to be those dominos hitting each other. They just hit each other: they are unconscious.

An “unconscious experiencer”, like an AI, is just a more complex version of this: it is mechanical parts hitting each other or transferring this or that—it is quantitative through-and-through just like the domino’s hitting each other. There is nothing it is like to be an AI in the sense like there is something to be like a qualitative experiencer: qualia (in the sense of instances of qualitative experience) have a “special” property of there being something it is like to be it (or perhaps to have it).

Strings of dominos performing calculations.

This is some disappointing reasoning Bob. Different complex systems have different emergent properties/qualities. Trivializing and then ignoring the complexity of physical systems doesn't make for serious thinking on the subject IMO.

Reply to wonderer1

Hello Wonderer1,

The analogy that I gave was perfectly fine within the context that it was given. I understand and agree that different systems have different emergent properties: I didn't deny that in my assessment whatsoever. I would suggest you read my conversation with Philosophim in its entirety without taking certain quotes out of context.

Also, I don't see the relevance of your linked YouTube video: so what if they can have domino's perform calculations?

Bob

Quoting Bob Ross

I don’t see, upon looking at the empirical experiments of blindsight people, why one would conclude that they no longer qualitatively experience. Just because they don’t identify as seeing doesn’t mean that they aren’t still having it.

This is just going around the assertion merry-go-round now, Bob. I'm going to put my case once more in a nutshell and then leave it there. The only evidence we have of qualitative experience is our awareness of our own and the reportage of others' awareness of their own. A person with visual agnosia cannot report on what they have no awareness of experiencing.

Now you can say that the body experiences the physical effects or data that enables the better than random guessing of the person with visual agnosia, in the sense that I have already outlined, but that is not subjective experience, it is equivalent in kind to saying that the stone experiences the weathering effects of the wind and rain. Experience in that sense is not qualitative but quantitative; it can be observed, measured and modeled.

Quoting Bob Ross

The sense of sight (as a qualitative experience) has something it is like in and of itself. In other words, even if I don’t understand that I am qualitatively seeing, there is still something it is like for me to be qualitatively seeing.

I think after hearing your explanation again, qualia boils down to subjective experience for me. But, we may dive a little deeper into what subjective experience means because I can see you don't quite mean that either.

Quoting Bob Ross

In other words, your qualitative experience is really a steady flow of experiences with no distinct boundaries between them; and you single out, or carve out, experiences to compare to others nominally.

This matches my definition of consciousness. Observation and identification. However, we still have slightly different viewpoints here.

Quoting Bob Ross

Do we give attention to certain experience over others?
…
Or is this about definitions/identities we create out of the stream of experience we have?

I would say both.

Just a call back here Bob, but this is what a discrete experiencer does.

Quoting Bob Ross

So I want to bring back the discussion to quantitative for a second. If a quantitative experience is an experience, is there something that has that experience? For lack of a better term, this would be an "unconscious experience"?

There is nothing it is like to have unconscious experience because it isn’t qualitative; and I think this is where we begin to disagree.

Ok, I think I've finally narrowed down the problem. We have two different uses of quantitative. We have a quantitative observation and a quantitative experience.

I think we both agree on quantitative observations. If I observe a thing calculating, then the measurement of that would be quantitative.

However, a quantitative experience is a contradiction. You've designed the word quantitative to be something that has no internal experience. If it has no internal experience, it is not an experience. The word quantitative can only be used as an objective outside observation, not an internal one. Therefore it simply can never be an experience without a contradiction of its base term. While it would be easy to dismiss it there, I think you're still trying to nail down something in particular, and I want to invite you to think with me on this.

Lets not use blindsight yet, but something more basic that we can all relate to. There is a nerve that by passes a cell in your lower leg. Its constantly there sending signals, but you're not conscious of it. We can describe this quantitatively of course. But its still a part of you isn't it? Unlike a row of dominos falling (I thought the analogy was quite fine Bob :) ) I can become conscious of that nerve at that cell if I receive a cut. I can have a subjective experience of that nerve cell eventually. I can never have the subjective experience of a set of falling dominos.

So when you mean quantitative experience, I think you're referring to a set of mechanics in our body that we could potentially be conscious of. Or at the least, somehow impacts our consciousness. I'm not quite sure what to call it. But I can see where the word "experience" would tend to come in, because there's the desire for us to say that the nerve cell is us, even though we aren't currently having qualia of it at any particular time.

Initially I want to call it 'unconscious embodiment', or something like that. Some things we are unconscious of can potentially be made conscious of, but then some things within our body we'll never be able to be conscious of, only quantitatively. For example, I'll never be able to conscious of the cells that produce my nails to the point that I can grow my nails faster or slower. I can only quantitatively observe how fast or slow my nails grow.

Also, something that we have an unconscious embodiment of can only be known quantitatively until we can know it qualitatively. This would match with the finding here. https://qz.com/1569158/neuroscientists-read-unconscious-brain-activity-to-predict-decisions

In that article there is a link to the original research paper. As noted:
"Neuroscientists have long known that the brain prepares to act before you’re consciously aware, and there are just a few milliseconds between when a thought is conscious and when you enact it."

And here perhaps we have the missing link. We cannot qualitatively experience the unconscious portions of ourselves. If we do, it then becomes a conscious portion of ourself. That is what I identify as subjective experience. The difference between the quantitative and the qualitative is the objective and the subjective. And our unconscious mind is the qualitative part of us that eventually we become subject to.

The unconscious portion of ourself is not qualia. It is outside of our conscious experience, and this fits with your definition of qualia. Unconsciousness is not a stream of experience that I am deciding what to focus or not to focus on, it is the unbidden processing that eventually becomes a qualia that we can focus on, blur, or dismiss.

Since the unconscious mind is measured quantitatively, and we see that it has a repeatable and known cause of what we qualitatively experience, we have more proof that the brain causes our qualitative experience, or subjective consciousness. We can quantitatively measure the brain and predict qualitative, or conscious outcomes.

Back to blindsight. We cannot say the person experiences seeing an object that they have no subjective conscious experience of. This is part of their unconscious embodiment. Their unconscious embodiment influences their consciousness to say, "I guess it is this," and be correct. This can be quantitatively measured but the subject has no qualia of that experience.

With quantitative experience being a contradiction, I'm not sure where you can go from here Bob. I've shown how we can scan the brain during brain surgery and map the brains signals to a person's subjective experience. I've demonstrated that the unconscious brain can be evaluated to accurately predict what a person will consciously say or experience. I've demonstrated that drugs can affect the consciousness of a person. The only thing left to you, which we both agree on, is that we cannot objectively know what its like to have the subjective experience of a being subjectively experiencing. But this alone is not enough to override the other facts presented at this moment.

Qualia/qualitative experience is simply subjective consciousness while quantitative analysis is simply objective consciousness. There's really no difference between them

This was an ambiguous sentence on my part that you interpreted against what I meant. I meant there was no difference between qualia and subjective consciousness, and a quantitative analysis and an objective measure of consciousness.

I'll leave that here and see what you say Bob.

Quoting Philosophim

Show me knowledge today of something that exists that is not matter and energy. If you do that, then I will concede. If you cannot, then my point stands.

The number 7 is not matter or energy, yet it exists.

Quoting Wayfarer

Show me knowledge today of something that exists that is not matter and energy. If you do that, then I will concede. If you cannot, then my point stands.
— Philosophim

The number 7 is not matter or energy, yet it exists.

I admit to some disappointment that my last reply was not addressed here, but I'll address this. What is the number 7 Wayfarer? It is an identity of the mind. Your ability to part and parcel reality into different identities, or "one" identity multiple times, is something most humans are capable of. The brain is as I noted previously, made of matter and energy. Your mind is your living brain. So is the identity of the number 7.

If you mark it down on a piece of paper, it exists in the form of ink and a dead tree. If you say it, it exists as a soundwave before dissipating. And if you think it in your mind, it exists as the energy and matter of your brain processing what we call a thought.

So how could it not exist as matter and energy?

Quoting Philosophim

how could it not exist as matter and energy?

The representation, the symbolic form, exists as matter, but the idea is real independently of the symbolic form. This is shown by the fact that the same idea can be represented by different forms, but 7=7 is true in all possible worlds. And that is so whether you think of it, or not, or whether it’s written down, or not.

Quoting Wayfarer

The representation, the symbolic form, exists as matter, but the idea is real independently of it’s symbolic form. This is shown by the fact that the same idea can be represented by different forms, but 7=7 is true in all possible worlds. And that is so whether you think of it, or not, or whether it’s written down, or not.

Referring back to your own words: Quoting Wayfarer

But this begs the question - it assumes what needs to be proven.

Quoting Wayfarer

Again your presumption of the reality of the object (the idea of 7) conditions your analysis - you presume that the object exists independently of any act of measurement, when that is precisely the point at issue!

Aren't you just assuming there are other possible worlds? Aren't you assuming that 7=7 is independent of any brain that can think or process that symbology? As for the same idea being represented in different forms, can water not exist as both vapor, liquid, and ice? If H20 does not come together, water does not exist. It has the potential to exist, just as 7=7 has the potential to exist within a thinking mind as an idea. But if there is no thinking mind, there is no 7=7. If there is no combination of H20, there is no water.

Quoting Philosophim

Aren't you assuming that 7=7 is independent of any brain that can think or process that symbology?

It's not an assumption, it's an axiom. The law of identity and other such principles of logic are assumed by the laws of inference. If they didn't stand, then you wouldn't be able to propose any kind of 'if:then' argument. They're woven into the very fabric of language and reason.

As for your example, it doesn't stand, as the various forms of water are known a posteriori, whereas the law of identity is known a priori i.e. independently of experience. You're comparing contingent facts, i.e. the fact that the combination of two elements produces water, with logical axioms.

But I don't expect that you will agree with this. What I expect is that you will translate it to your own specific system of reference, which has few reference points with the broader subject in philosophy.

//ps - also inserting 'the idea of 7' into that sentence from me, completely changes the meaning of the sentence. I was referring to the instinctive belief in the 'mind-independent nature' of objects, which is just what has been called into question by quantum physics, where the act of measurement determines the outcome of the observation. Discussion of ontology of numbers is a completely different matter.//

Quoting Wayfarer

It's not an assumption, it's an axiom. The law of identity and other such principles of logic are assumed by the laws of inference. If they didn't stand, then you wouldn't be able to propose any kind of 'if:then' argument. They're woven into the very fabric of language and reason.

The law of identity, number and "other such principles of logic" are axioms of human reason, and as such say nothing about what exists independently of human reason.

This is no different, in principle, than saying that the ideas about material objects are categories of human reason and say nothing about the existence of anything independent of human perception and judgement.

Quoting Janus

The law of identity, number and "other such principles of logic" are axioms of human reason, and as such say nothing about what exists independently of human reason.

Indeed, nothing can be said about what exists independently of human faculties (including reason) as whatever that might be, is beyond the scope of knowledge. Regardless, I have the view that the law of the excluded middle and other such basic elements of reason, are not dependent on human faculties, but because we have the faculty of reason we are able to discern them. It's precisely the ability of humans to grasp such facts which constitutes reason.

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

Ok, I think I've finally narrowed down the problem. We have two different uses of quantitative. We have a quantitative observation and a quantitative experience.

It seems as though you are using the term “experience” to refer strictly to “qualitative experience”, which is fine, and if so, then I completely agree with you that ‘quantitative experience’ is a contradiction in terms. However, I was using it in the sense that you were before: mere awareness (i.e., observation, identification, and action). So when I said “quantitative experience” I was keeping in conformance with your schema, which, at the time, was not using “experience” that strictly but, rather, more loosely to include any being which observes (essentially). In this case, there is no contradiction in terms because you can have a being which observes and has no qualitative experience.

All that you have done here is switched the meanings of the terms. The point is that your objective consciousness is only this sort of quantitative experience, where “experience” is mere awareness/observation.

The word quantitative can only be used as an objective outside observation, not an internal one.

I think I agree: an AI is said to have no internal ‘experience’ (in the sense you are now using it) but is understood as still able to observe, and its ability to observe is explained via quantitative measurements. Is that what you are saying?

Lets not use blindsight yet, but something more basic that we can all relate to. There is a nerve that by passes a cell in your lower leg. Its constantly there sending signals, but you're not conscious of it. We can describe this quantitatively of course. But its still a part of you isn't it? Unlike a row of dominos falling (I thought the analogy was quite fine Bob :) ) I can become conscious of that nerve at that cell if I receive a cut. I can have a subjective experience of that nerve cell eventually. I can never have the subjective experience of a set of falling dominos.

So, although I understand what you are saying, I think you are conflating consciousness proper with meta-consciousness; to keep it brief, there is a difference between having introspective access to one’s qualitative experiences and simply having them. Think of a beetle, they are such a low form of life that they have 0 introspective access to their experience, but they are nevertheless experiencing (qualitatively).

Perhaps the confusion lies in that I am not referring to the ‘I’ as the ego. As a subject, I am referring to myself as a complete organism (which I hold is a mind). With physicalist terms, think of it analogous to the ego vs. oneself as a physical organism: is the ‘I’ the ego—no! It is an extension of the ‘I’. So the nerve you are referring to, and all other organic processes of my body, are mind processes (under my view): my mind is having those experiences, but ‘me’ as the ‘ego’ does not have the introspective access to all of all the time. It doesn’t come into “consciousness” when I get cut there but, rather, into the sphere of access my ego has as the tip of the iceberg.

So, I agree that there is a difference between the set of falling dominos (which you won’t ever experience) and the nerve you were talking about; but by ‘you’ I am referring to the complete organism of yourself and that nerve is a part of the experience (and manifestation of your will) of yourself as mind, where when it gets cut, in most situations, it becomes introspectively accessible.

Let’s take a more extreme example to convey my point, when I was younger I tried THC from a dab pen; however, lo and behold, it turns out it was spice (which is a much more dangerous psychotic drug that is made synthetically with harmful chemicals). Not to derail into all the details, but I’ve never had that potent and horrifying sort of experiences in my life (and I hope I never do again): at some points I thought I was dead and others I thought I was going to be. Anyways, spice is so unpredictable and in my case I got its most potent affects, and part of that was going “unconscious” but functioning perfectly fine for large lengths of time. I would just “wake up” in the middle of conversing with someone or folding my clothes to put away in my closet, having every reason to believe I had been doing all this stuff with absolutely no “conscious” experience whatsoever. Philosophim, I think you would consider this an example of being, temporarily, a PZ.

From your perspective, I think you are inclined to say that the qualitative experience was gone during those blackouts, and that I was essentially a PZ during those moments. But, to me, we are thereby conflating the ego with the true ‘I’: I was still experiencing (e.g., folding my clothes, conversing with people, watching TV, etc.) but my ‘ego’ had left the chat, so to speak. Spice had, some way or another, inhibited my higher functioning capabilities, which includes the illusory ego and its introspective access to my qualitative experience. There was still something to be like me while I was blacked out, because by “I was blacked out” I am referring to the ego while by “something to be like me” I am referring to the true self. Hopefully that makes some sense. I use that example because it is the most extreme one I can think of that would prima facie work in your favor.

Also, something that we have an unconscious embodiment of can only be known quantitatively until we can know it qualitatively. This would match with the finding here

What you are saying does fit fine with the scientific discoveries that we make decisions before our ego is aware of them—but it fits equally (if not arguably better) to say that the “unconscious embodiment” is really qualitative experience proper, and the “conscious embodiment” (you are referring to) is the ego’s introspective access thereto and, consequently, it makes sense that we should expect to identify a person making decisions before their ego is aware of them: the ego is an illusion.

In terms of the rest of your post, I think it is better if we address the objective vs. subjective consciousness distinction more deeply before revisiting the rest, because at this point I will just be countering in the same manner as before (e.g., nothing about what you have said proves the brain produces consciousness, blindsight person isn’t unconscious, etc.). Once the distinction is thoroughly analyzed, I think the hard problem will start to naturally emerge out of it. This is because I think, after hearing your view thus far, that you are holding internal incoherencies with this objective vs. subjective dynamic.

The first thing we need to discuss about it is the conceptual bridge linking the two. I think that you see the objective and subjective as two sides of the same coin, but you equally hold that the objective doesn’t prove the subjective—and these two claims are incoherent with each other.

So let me ask you: do you think we can know a being is subjectively conscious if we know they are objectively conscious?

If not, then this means science, by your own lights, cannot prove someone is subjectively conscious. What does this mean? It means that everyone who knows they are subjectively conscious has no scientific explanation of what that is.

Take yourself, for example: you know you are subjectively conscious. However, you equally hold that objectively observing yourself only gets you to the conclusion that you are objectively conscious, which doesn’t prove anything beyond you being a PZ (at a minimum). This means that no objective can explain your subjective consciousness (since it only gets you to a PZ) and thusly you cannot reduce your subjective consciousness to objective inquiry of brain states.

Now, I think you hold that the brain produces subjective consciousness, even though you equally admit that it cannot since it can only provide that someone is a PZ, because we can affect consciousness by affecting the brain (and, quite frankly, the whole body). Is this correct?

If you agree with the previous paragraph, then you can’t equally claim that objective consciousness cannot give us the understanding that something is subjectively conscious (and thusly cannot claim that objective consciousness only gets us to PZs), or if you do think it only gets us to PZs, then you can’t agree with the previous paragraph: they are incoherent with each other.

Let’s start there.

Bob

Quoting Wayfarer

Regardless, I have the view that the law of the excluded middle and other such basic elements of reason, are not dependent on human faculties, but because we have the faculty of reason we are able to discern them. It's precisely the ability of humans to grasp such facts which constitutes reason.

Quoting Wayfarer

Indeed, nothing can be said about what exists independently of human faculties (including reason) as whatever that might be, is beyond the scope of knowledge.

Do you see how your own criticisms contradict your own statements? You claimed that "laws" exist apart from human reason, then in another reply you note that nothing can be said about what exists independent of our reason. Wayferer, how is that any different from humanities conclusion that physical objects exist apart from us, and we have the reason to discern them? Isn't precisely the human ability to grasp such facts which constitute reason? According to your own answer to Janus, your point is invalid.

Quoting Wayfarer

As for your example, it doesn't stand, as the various forms of water are known a posteriori, whereas the law of identity is known a priori i.e. independently of experience.

You're not comparing equivalent examples. "Can seven not exist in terms of bananas, dollars, and cars? " would be an equivalent comparison of a posteriori.

In the case of 7=7 could I not also say H20=H20, or "real physical properties" = "real physical properties"? Since real physical properties are equal to real physical properties, this is known apriori, or independently of experience right?

Personally, I do not believe in a posteriori or a priori as a good and clear separation of knowledge claims, but I will go with your separation for now. All I ask is for you to apply your criticisms against an outside physical world to your own ideas of the mental world equivalently.

Quoting Wayfarer

I was referring to the instinctive belief in the 'mind-independent nature' of objects, which is just what has been called into question by quantum physics, where the act of measurement determines the outcome of the observation.

That doesn't argue for the mind-independent nature of objects at all though. It notes that our ability to measure, which is applying X to Y and reading the bounce back, affects the outcome. It also notes that because we cannot track the exact location of an object due to very small objects vibrations and fluctuations, we use probability with limits to guess what the particles' location and velocity is to begin with. These are all physical realities, not mind-independent realities.

Reply to Philosophim I stand by the basic claim that numbers, logical principles, and the like, cannot be explained in terms of the interactions of matter. That reason comprises the relationship of ideas, not the relations between material entities.

Quoting Philosophim

In the case of 7=7 could I not also say H20=H20, or "real physical properties" = "real physical properties"? Since real physical properties are equal to real physical properties, this is known apriori, or independently of experience right?

Notice in all those examples, you're appealing to the law of identity. But (as per the argument in the Phaedo) you already need to have the concept or idea of 'equals' in order to make that comparison. You can say that the weight of two 500 gram apples equals the weight of one 1Kg melon, but that's because you're mathematically literate and can grasp the meaning of 'the same as' or 'equal to'. It's those intellectual operations, which we rely on for all manner of reasoned inference, which I say can't be explained in terms of matter and energy.

Quoting Wayfarer

Indeed, nothing can be said about what exists independently of human faculties (including reason) as whatever that might be, is beyond the scope of knowledge. Regardless, I have the view that the law of the excluded middle and other such basic elements of reason, are not dependent on human faculties, but because we have the faculty of reason we are able to discern them. It's precisely the ability of humans to grasp such facts which constitutes reason.

Sure, for subjective reasons you like to believe that logical laws are independent of human reason, but you don't like to believe that material objects are. It could be both; our logic is derived from generalizing from the analysis of our experience of material objects, and they are thus both independent, or not, of our experience, depending on your preference.

The bottom line is, we don't and cannot know the answer to that question and are therefore left with going with what seems most plausible, or perhaps most agreeable, to us personally. Either that or we have the option of simply suspending judgement on the matter, which is my preferred option, since I don't believe the answer to an unanswerable question can be important to human life.

That said, the fact that we face an unanswerable question is a very important fact about human life, as it explains so much about us. And how we deal with that unanswerable question, that is what it leads us to believe is also important, as it can be the source of happiness and misery on a personal level, and ideology, repression, division, hatred, enslavement, torture and many other evils on the societal level. Perhaps the world would be a much better place if everyone could suspend judgement and give up arguing and even fighting over it.

So, you are wrong to say this is just more of my subjectivism; we are all subjectivists when it comes to how we deal with this unanswerable question, and you not liking that fact ain't going to change it one iota.

Quoting Janus

Sure, for subjective reasons you like to believe that logical laws are independent of human reason, but you don't like to believe that material objects are.

My reasoning is not subjective. I take it as axiomatic that the basic laws of logic are consistent everywhere. You will find they hold as much in Indian philosophy as in Greek.

The issue with the independence of the objects of perception is another matter. I've already pointed out the issue with this statement:

Quoting Philosophim

Subjective consciousness creates a subjective reality. Subjective reality does not alter objective reality.

but I got nowhere with it. Suffice to refer to enactivism. 'Enactivism rejects the traditional dualistic view that separates subjective and objective aspects of experience. Instead, it proposes an embodied and situated perspective, where subjectivity and objectivity are intertwined and mutually constitutive.' Subjects and objects co-arise and are mutually dependent.

Quoting Janus

our logic is derived from generalizing from the analysis of our experience of material objects,

So empirical philosophers say, but the counter to that is that we would not be able to generalise or abstract without the prior existence of the rational faculty to count, compare, abstract and reason

Your reasoning is necessarily subjective. The rules of logic are objective but they are rule-based procedures which guarantee validity even in the case of the most absurd syllogisms, and they tell us nothing about the nature of things.

Quoting Wayfarer

our logic is derived from generalizing from the analysis of our experience of material objects,
— Janus

So empirical philosophers say, but the counter to that is that we would not be able to generalise or abstract without the prior existence of the rational faculty to count, compare, abstract and reason

I said it could be both (with the implication that it could be either) but you conveniently omitted that part when you quoted me, in order it seems, as usual, to attempt to dismiss my arguments by characterizing them as some form of your despised positivism.

And the counter to your counter is that without the experience of the senses and embodiment we would have nothing to count, compare, abstract and reason about, and would thus never develop those faculties.

Quoting Wayfarer

Suffice to refer to enactivism. 'Enactivism rejects the traditional dualistic view that separates subjective and objective aspects of experience. Instead, it proposes an embodied and situated perspective, where subjectivity and objectivity are intertwined and mutually constitutive.' Subjects and objects co-arise and are mutually dependent.

I think this shows a misunderstanding of enactivism and phenomenology. Remember that Husserl brackets the question of the independent reality of the objective or external world, because that question is not its concern. So, of course, within human experience subject and object arise together, but that says nothing about what the in-itself reality of what appear to us as objects, including our own bodies and brains, is. That we cannot know what this in-itself reality is, is what Kant's philosophy is all about. I know it's a difficult point to get, it requires a shift away from our ordinary thinking, so I feel for you.

Reply to Janus

Hello Janus,

A person with visual agnosia cannot report on what they have no awareness of experiencing

Correct. So why say they aren’t qualitatively experiencing? This just proves my point.

The only evidence we have of qualitative experience is our awareness of our own and the reportage of others' awareness of their own.

Correct. But that doesn’t mean that it is contingent on our awareness of our qualitative experience. For example, I only come to know that there is a chair in my room via my senses, but it does not follow that that chair only exists as my senses. Likewise, you are claiming that because we only come to know we qualitatively experience via introspection, that introspection is required to qualitatively experience: same error.

Now you can say that the body experiences the physical effects or data that enables the better than random guessing of the person with visual agnosia, in the sense that I have already outlined, but that is not subjective experience, it is equivalent in kind to saying that the stone experiences the weathering effects of the wind and rain.

What do you mean by “subjective experience”? I have a feeling you mean higher order meta-consciousness (e.g., self-reflective introspective, etc.). That isn’t consciousness proper.

No, a person qualitatively experiencing without introspective access is not equivalent to a stone experiencing nor quantitative experience.

Bob

Quoting Bob Ross

Correct. So why say they aren’t qualitatively experiencing? This just proves my point.

You obviously didn't read what I wrote above what you quoted, which was that the only way we have of knowing about qualitative experience is being aware of our own or listening to the reports of others about their own. The person with visual agnosia cannot report on any qualitive visual experience because they are not aware of any such thing, so we have no evidence to suggest that they have any qualitive visual experience.

Quoting Bob Ross

For example, I only come to know that there is a chair in my room via my senses, but it does not follow that that chair only exists as my senses.

Firstly, you are changing the subject. Qualities are necessarily not independent of subjective human experience, whereas chairs may not be. If I don't subjectively experience a chair, then there is no qualitive experience of a chair, although of course the chair may be there nonetheless. Actually, I would have thought you believed that the chair is not independent of human experience; I thought that has been the very thing you are arguing.

So again, you are not really providing any counterarguments; instead, you just keep asserting the same things over and over. You should be able to understand my argument above, and if you cannot provide any cogent counterargument then our discussion will go precisely nowhere.

Quoting Bob Ross

What do you mean by “subjective experience”? I have a feeling you mean higher order meta-consciousness (e.g., self-reflective introspective, etc.). That isn’t consciousness proper.

No, a person qualitatively experiencing without introspective access is not equivalent to a stone experiencing nor quantitative experience.

You just keep making the same unargued assertions over and over. Subjective experience, and along with that qualitative experience, may be a post hoc self-reflective rationalization and thus not a suitable descriptor of what is immediately perceived, but I am not claiming that is so, I just see it as a possibility.

The body/ brain responding to visual stimuli can be observed, even when the subject is not aware of what is affecting the body, and that is one way of speaking about what the body/ brain experiences. The body/ brain experiences many, many things in this kind of sense of which we are not aware. I see visual agnosia as being like that: the body/ brain is affected by visual stimuli but the subject is not aware of it, so for me it makes no sense to speak of qualitive experience in that context.

If you have a different definition of qualitive experience, then we are talking past one another. And if you do have a different definition, you haven't yet revealed what that definition is. For example, how would it differ from the body/ brain reacting in measurable and modelable ways, ways however of which the subject has no awareness, to visual stimuli?

Reply to Janus

Hello Janus,

You obviously didn't read what I wrote above what you quoted, which was that the only way we have of knowing about qualitative experience is being aware of our own or listening to the reports of others about their own. The person with visual agnosia cannot report on any qualitive visual experience because they are not aware of any such thing, so we have no evidence to suggest that they have any qualitive visual experience.

Yes I did:

”The only evidence we have of qualitative experience is our awareness of our own and the reportage of others' awareness of their own.” – Janus

Correct. But that doesn’t mean that it is contingent on our awareness of our qualitative experience. For example, I only come to know that there is a chair in my room via my senses, but it does not follow that that chair only exists as my senses. Likewise, you are claiming that because we only come to know we qualitatively experience via introspection, that introspection is required to qualitatively experience: same error.

Firstly, you are changing the subject. Qualities are necessarily not independent of subjective human experience, whereas chairs may not be.

I didn’t change the subject: it was an analogy. I wasn’t saying those two scenarios are equivalent.

My point was that you are conflating our epistemic access to a thing with its contingency on us for its existence (viz., that we don’t have qualitative experience since we only know we have it when we have awareness of it). That is analogous to saying that the chair of which I see (which I only know via my sense of sight) is contingent on myself (in terms of its existence) thereby—it is a conflation.

Actually, I would have thought you believed that the chair is not independent of human experience; I thought that has been the very thing you are arguing.

I would say it is mind-dependent, but not on my mind. The chair I see is not dependent on my perceiving of it—it exists as an idea on a Universal Mind.

So again, you are not really providing any counterarguments; instead, you just keep asserting the same things over and over. You should be able to understand my argument above, and if you cannot provide any cogent counterargument then our discussion will go precisely nowhere.

I think I have provided ample counterarguments here: you just skipped the most important one when responding (which I re-quoted at the beginning).

Subjective experience, and along with that qualitative experience, may be a post hoc self-reflective rationalization and thus not a suitable descriptor of what is immediately perceived, but I am not claiming that is so, I just see it as a possibility.

I never said that qualitative experience is a ‘post hoc self-reflective rationalization’. You are arguing against a straw man here. Qualitative experience is, to me, defined negatively: the non-quantitative experience which there is something it is like to be such in and of itself.

The body/ brain responding to visual stimuli can be observed, even when the subject is not aware of what is affecting the body, and that is one way of speaking about what the body/ brain experiences.

Again, you are talking about meta-consciousness. A person can have zero introspective access, as the ego, to the mental events that are occurring. I don’t see how this is a “unargued assertion”.

For example, how would it differ from the body/ brain reacting in measurable and modelable ways, ways however of which the subject has no awareness, to visual stimuli?

Under Analytic Idealism, the body/brain “reacting in measurable...ways” is an extrinsic representation of the mentality which is fundamentally occurring. So the “subject” is that organism you see as a body, but that is its outward expression on the dashboard of your experience. What you are describing is the outward expression of a qualitatively experiencing being, which is not equivalent to the ego which sometimes has introspective access to the experiences (for some animals—not even all have it).

Bob

Great post Bob! I agree with you that at this time there are a few differences of definitions, and we both have to clarify what we mean to a point where we can say we completely understand each other's viewpoints first.

Quoting Bob Ross

However, I was using it in the sense that you were before: mere awareness (i.e., observation, identification, and action). ...In this case, there is no contradiction in terms because you can have a being which observes and has no qualitative experience.

I think this was a misunderstanding of an implicit part of the definition of observation. As I defined it was always intended to be qualitative experience.

Quoting Philosophim

Observation is the receipt of some type of information. This could be a sense, sensation, or even a thought. Another way to look at is is "undefined experience".

This misunderstanding is on trying to blend our different terms together. I had used the example of a camera and an AI as an observer and identifier. The AI is the observer and identifier, the camera merely provides the information for the AI. Of course, its easy to then say the "camera" is observing. I tried to pivot to your notion of quantitative for the camera, or that we simply observe the camera follows basic set processes of filtering light. I agreed with you that a camera does not have qualitative experience, therefore it is not an observer. At that point I should have switched from "being that observes" to "an observer" to fit better within your terms. A camera quantitatively processes data, but it is not an observer. I can agree with this understanding while also using your terminology.

Quoting Bob Ross

The point is that your objective consciousness is only this sort of quantitative experience, where “experience” is mere awareness/observation.

Regardless of our opinions on what definitions to use, we cannot use the term 'quantitative experience'. This simply does not work. Objective consciousness is a quantitative analysis of consciousness. Not an experience, ie subjective viewpoint. If you note that a being can have a quantitative experience, then you are conceding that we can know what a beings subjective experience is like through objective means.

Quoting Bob Ross

The word quantitative can only be used as an objective outside observation, not an internal one.

I think I agree: an AI is said to have no internal ‘experience’ (in the sense you are now using it) but is understood as still able to observe, and its ability to observe is explained via quantitative measurements. Is that what you are saying?

No, I noted that an AI is an observer and identifies. Therefore it is subjectively conscious under my initial definition. However, we must more clearly define that this AI must have an "I" which can evaluate as well. I'll go into more detail that later. We objectively know it is conscious because we quantitatively, or by math, understand how it observes and identifies information through functions and algorithms. But do we know what its like to experience being an ai as it observes and identifies? No.

Quoting Bob Ross

So, although I understand what you are saying, I think you are conflating consciousness proper with meta-consciousness; to keep it brief, there is a difference between having introspective access to one’s qualitative experiences and simply having them. Think of a beetle, they are such a low form of life that they have 0 introspective access to their experience, but they are nevertheless experiencing (qualitatively).

I think one mistake we've talked past a bit on is what I mean by consciousness. My points are not concerned with higher levels of consciousness or meta consciousness. They really are just about whether there is an experiencing being or a mechanical process which has no experience. To ease confusion and simplify our points, meta-consciousness should not be brought up as I don't see the need for it. When considering consciousness then, we are discussing the minimally viable level to be conscious. That would be experiencing qualia, which requires an "I".

If a beetle can experience and identify, then it is conscious according to my definition. But you make a fantastic point with your example of your unfortunate experience. I have had to step back and wonder if my definition of consciousness was not detailed enough and too implicit. First, there is the question as to whether you were conscious, but you didn't remember that you were conscious. From my point of view, consciousness does not require a memory of being conscious. But does it require memory? For our discussion, I suppose it doesn't. Memory would perhaps involve higher level consciousness, but for base consciousness, no.

Of course, we then come to the other question of your experience. Is it that you didn't remember being conscious, or were you actually unconsciously doing things and no one around you knew? We can site sleep walkers who do things unconsciously and note that in every case, another person can tell they lack some type of consciousness. Still, there has to be some experience and identifying going on with sleep walking. So the question remains. Are they conscious and do not remember being conscious, or can the unconscious mind also observe and identify?

Ironically, my citation of brain scans can give us that answer. if it is the case that brain scans can detect that the unconscious mind is shaping what your conscious mind is about to do, then the answer is obvious. The unconscious mind can observe and identify. But is it itself an observer? I'll get to that soon as well.

Quoting Bob Ross

From your perspective, I think you are inclined to say that the qualitative experience was gone during those blackouts, and that I was essentially a PZ during those moments. But, to me, we are thereby conflating the ego with the true ‘I’: I was still experiencing (e.g., folding my clothes, conversing with people, watching TV, etc.) but my ‘ego’ had left the chat, so to speak.

I think this nails the issue down. In the common use of unconscious and conscious, there needs to be the "I", or ego. As I noted, when I said "observe" there's really the implicit I in that statement. So to be explicit, a conscious being is an "I" which observes and identifies. The question still remains as to whether you simply forgot your conscious experience, or if even an unconscious experience has a subjective viewpoint that we are unaware of.

So what does this change? Not much, but it does clarify. The unconscious portion of yourself would be "you", or what you are potentially able to access consciously, while the conscious part would be the ego "I" part of yourself. This would be your subjective consciousness. Where does that leave objective consciousness then? We would just expand our objective test to see by actions things that only a person with an I could do.

Now that I understand you don't divide the "I" between conscious and unconscious, I find your ideas more intriguing and understand some of the earlier points you were making. Also explicitly noting that subjective consciousness requires an I from me does make some of my earlier statements incomplete. I stated that a camera and an AI would be conscious, but no. At minimum it could be unconscious! We would need to have an AI that also would meet the standard for what an "I" is. Consciousness is a next step evaluation of unconscious processing (observing and identifying) that forms an "I".

There is a deeper question here as well. Just because "I" am not experiencing, does that mean that the subconscious has a subjective experience that we are simply unable to know? Schizophrenia is a condition in which a person can express multiple personalities. I've seen it first hand. What if Schizophrenia is a condition where certain unconscious portions of the mind which would normally stay unconscious suddenly enter into the realm of consciousness? Same with "voices" in one's head that don't seem to be one's own.

This is the natural consequence of not being able to determine what it is like for something to experience from its viewpoint. But if an unconscious mind does have a view point that our "I" is unaware of, does that change the notion of consciousness and unconsciousness? I'll need time to think on that personally. At least we both agree on something. It is impossible to know what another things subjective experience is like.

Quoting Bob Ross

I think that you see the objective and subjective as two sides of the same coin, but you equally hold that the objective doesn’t prove the subjective—and these two claims are incoherent with each other.

Let me clarify. It is not that the objective does not prove that other beings have subjective experiences. It is only that the objective cannot prove what it is like to BE that subjective experiencer. I've noted brain scans and surgery, which I understand you do not want to accept. If you cannot accept that your mind is caused by your brain, then of course we will have to agree to disagree here.

So I think we can conclude a few things from our excellent discussion.

1. You and I disagree on the definition of consciousness. I require a subjective "I". If I understand correctly, in your view the unconscious still has qualia, which I consider needing a subjective "I" to experience. In your view however the unconscious subject is still an "I" in the sense that this unconsciousness is potentially accessible to the conscious (speaking generally, I understand there are exceptions).

2. You and I disagree on whether or not the brain causes consciousness. A large part of this may be due to your definitions of qualia and consciousness. While you state you believe I have not given enough evidence to prove that the brain causes consciousness, under my terms I have. I have not seen the citations I've given be refuted in any way. Even if you note that the unconscious experiences qualia, the brain scans detecting what the unconscious is thinking about proves it still comes from the brain.
Perhaps it is true that the unconscious has a personal "I", just one that we are not privy too. I would need to look more into the study of the unconscious to make a decision here.

Since I'm not sure there's much more that can be said with these differences, I would like to explore another question. What is your reason for believing that consciousness is not caused by the brain? How will this line of thinking help society? Or is it merely that you just don't see the logical connections, and believe such conclusions are premature and prevent us from discovering the real alternative? My approach to philosophy has always been to make greater sense of the general understanding of the world. To take our common language, clarify it, and get rid of the skepticism or ambiguity that causes confusion at a deeper level. Paradigm shifts like yours seem like radical departures from the norm, and I've always wondered at the motivation for such. Obviously I am not in agreement with it, but it doesn't mean that I can't try to understand it.

This disagreement is also done in full respect Bob! Fantastic thinking was had by all sides, and I have a much better respect for your position now that I understand better the nature of your definitions and outlook. I look forward to your reply.

Quoting Wayfarer

I stand by the basic claim that numbers, logical principles, and the like, cannot be explained in terms of the interactions of matter. That reason comprises the relationship of ideas, not the relations between material entities.

Its fine if you wish to stand by that, but it did not counter my point which refutes that. I can respect this however. You've demonstrated your reasons, which has at least helped me to see why you have the view you do. I approach discussions not with the goal of convincing someone else to take another view point because people will believe what they want to believe. I view a discussion as challenging my own logic, and once I believe its been adequately addressed by the other person, I am satisfied.

Quoting Wayfarer

You can say that the weight of two 500 gram apples equals the weight of one 1Kg melon, but that's because you're mathematically literate and can grasp the meaning of 'the same as' or 'equal to'.

Right, but this equally applies to discussion of water as I noted earlier. My point is that the ability to identify is the same in both instances. The ability to identify in no way proves that we cannot misidentify. If the mind was independent of objects, then we would not fear misidentifying as a threat to our existence. If I misidentify water versus oxygen when I breath, I'm going to die. My mind cannot prevent that. Therefore it is a logical conclusion that there are objects independent of the mind.

Quoting Wayfarer

It's those intellectual operations, which we rely on for all manner of reasoned inference, which I say can't be explained in terms of matter and energy.

You may say this, but I've shown it is. Your brain is made up of matter and energy. Incredulity, disbelief, or the inability to comprehend something does not negate its reality. Until you can show that intellectual operations can exist apart from matter and energy, its not a valid claim.

Reply to Philosophim

Hello Philosophim,

I think this was a misunderstanding of an implicit part of the definition of observation. As I defined it was always intended to be qualitative experience.

Observation is the receipt of some type of information. This could be a sense, sensation, or even a thought. Another way to look at is is "undefined experience".

Oh I see: the issue I would have here is that a “sense” can be purely quantitative (unless perhaps you also define it as having to be qualitative?). For example:

The AI is the observer and identifier, the camera merely provides the information for the AI

Although, yes, the camera doesn’t identify anything, both the AI and the camera can be explained by reduction to its parts and relations of those parts, and thusly there is no qualitative experience needed to be positing to explain anything.

I think, in the case that I am right that there is no qualitative experience for the AI (and camera), you would classify it as not ‘observing’ because that word entails for you ‘qualitative experience’. However, to me, something can be interpreting its environment (which is what I mean by ‘observation’) and have no qualitative experience (i.e., ‘observation’ in your sense of the term). If I use your terms here, then I would say the AI isn’t an observer (because it isn’t qualitatively experiencing), but it does interpret and navigate its environment (regardless of the fact that it isn’t qualitatively experiencing). I think you would just have to come up with a new term for the latter if you re-define the former in that manner.

Regardless of our opinions on what definitions to use, we cannot use the term 'quantitative experience'. This simply does not work

It doesn’t work within your terms (now that I know that you mean ‘qualitative experience’ by ‘experience’), but the point is that you can have an ‘observer’ in the sense of being capable of comprehending its environment (i.e., it is ‘aware’) and yet doesn’t qualitatively experience. So, to me, you could have a ‘quantitative experiencer’ in this sense.

If you note that a being can have a quantitative experience, then you are conceding that we can know what a beings subjective experience is like through objective means.

Not quite. I am saying quantitatively experiencing beings, which I only mean by that a being which can interpret its environment, have no subjective experience because is no subject. The AI is not a subject, but it can gather, via quantitative processes, information about its environment. There is nothing to be like an AI from the AI perspective because it doesn’t have a perspective.

No, I noted that an AI is an observer and identifies.
…
We objectively know it is conscious because we quantitatively, or by math, understand how it observes and identifies information through functions and algorithms. But do we know what its like to experience being an ai as it observes and identifies? No.

This goes back to the issue I was trying to get you to answer, so let me invoke your response here:

It is not that the objective does not prove that other beings have subjective experiences. It is only that the objective cannot prove what it is like to BE that subjective experiencer.

If the objective analysis of consciousness is only barred from knowing what it is like to be conscious as opposed to knowing that one is conscious, then I disagree with your distinction (between the objective and subjective analysis).

To go back to the other quote above, just because we can understand that a think can observe and identify information in a quantitative sense does not mean that they are a subject—that they have qualitative experience. This is equally barred from objective inquiry in the sense that I am understanding you to be talking about.

In other words, objective inquiry can tell me that the AI can receive and interpret information about its environment, but that says nothing about whether there even is something to be like it (as opposed to merely not knowing what it is like), because that says equally nothing about whether the being has qualitative experience. To prove that, I would have to be able to conceptually explain how the quantitative processes of the AI produce a stream of qualitative experiences.

But do we know what its like to experience being an ai as it observes and identifies? No.

You are assuming that there is something it is like to experience as an AI, because you are equally assuming that the AI is a subject proper.

I think one mistake we've talked past a bit on is what I mean by consciousness. My points are not concerned with higher levels of consciousness or meta consciousness.

That is fair, but I think here and there you conflate the two when countering my points—that’s the only reason I bring it up. I am not saying that consciousness proper is something which we have introspective access to as the ego, nor that it is the ego itself. I think sometimes you have been implicitly arguing against a view like that instead of mine (inadvertently).

They really are just about whether there is an experiencing being or a mechanical process which has no experience.

So in the sense of ‘experience’ that you are using here, I would say that the AI is a mechanical process which has no experience. However, it can interpret and navigate its environment nonetheless—and this isn’t incoherent with your definitions as you have set them up thus far.

To ease confusion and simplify our points, meta-consciousness should not be brought up as I don't see the need for it. When considering consciousness then, we are discussing the minimally viable level to be conscious. That would be experiencing qualia, which requires an "I".

Fair enough.

First, there is the question as to whether you were conscious, but you didn't remember that you were conscious. From my point of view, consciousness does not require a memory of being conscious. But does it require memory? For our discussion, I suppose it doesn't. Memory would perhaps involve higher level consciousness, but for base consciousness, no

It is always possible that I just don’t remember, but I do remember the areas where I was “awake” as the ego, so I doubt it.

I agree that consciousness proper does not require memory.

Is it that you didn't remember being conscious, or were you actually unconsciously doing things and no one around you knew?

I think I genuinely just, as the ego, didn’t have access to my conscious experience. I am pretty sure I wasn’t perfectly functioning (e.g., some slurred or delayed speech, etc.), but I was functioning enough to converse and do chores (like fold clothes). I was definitely impaired, and I would imagine people could guess I was; but the point is that, from my perspective as the ego, I had no introspective access to the qualitative experience.

Are they conscious and do not remember being conscious, or can the unconscious mind also observe and identify?

Ironically, my citation of brain scans can give us that answer. if it is the case that brain scans can detect that the unconscious mind is shaping what your conscious mind is about to do, then the answer is obvious.

The problem I have with this is that the brain scans can equally explain my position: the mind’s activity is expressed within perception as neural firings in the brain (and other indicators throughout the body): the body is the extrinsic representation of the mind. So, I don’t see how brain scans here exclusively pertain to your view that it is an unconscious mind shaping a conscious mind.

I think this nails the issue down. In the common use of unconscious and conscious, there needs to be the "I", or ego

To me, the ‘I’ and ‘ego’ are different. As long as there is an I, then it is consciousness—the ego doesn’t have to be there.

So to be explicit, a conscious being is an "I" which observes and identifies.

Then an AI isn’t conscious because it isn’t an “I”. Of course it mimicks what an ‘I’ does, but it is just mechanical processes with no true subject.

The question still remains as to whether you simply forgot your conscious experience, or if even an unconscious experience has a subjective viewpoint that we are unaware of.

I would say that the best explanation is neither of those: ‘i’ as the ego, as a higher function of consciousness, was inhibited by the drug and the ‘I’ was still there. ‘I’ was still conscious, but the ‘i’ was unconscious (if you will).

There is a deeper question here as well. Just because "I" am not experiencing, does that mean that the subconscious has a subjective experience that we are simply unable to know?

To me, the subconscious and unconscious are really different degrees of consciousness proper.

You and I disagree on the definition of consciousness. I require a subjective "I". If I understand correctly, in your view the unconscious still has qualia, which I consider needing a subjective "I" to experience.

No, I agree that consciousness requires a subject, I am saying that the ‘I’ is not the ego and the body is an extrinsic representation of mind operations of that ‘I’.

The ‘I’ isn’t unconscious.

In your view however the unconscious subject is still an "I" in the sense that this unconsciousness is potentially accessible to the conscious (speaking generally, I understand there are exceptions).

Sort of. I would say that the ‘I’ is conscious and the ‘conscious’ aspects you are referring to are higher order aspects of consciousness (such as meta-consciousness: introspection and cognitive self-reflection: the ego). That is why I keep bringing up meta-consciousness, because I do think, in this quote, you are using the term ‘conscious’ to refer to ego-contingent introspective awareness, which is to conflate meta-consciousness with the consciouness proper that you claimed you were meaning by that term.

Even if you note that the unconscious experiences qualia, the brain scans detecting what the unconscious is thinking about proves it still comes from the brain.

Again, brain scans equally prove my theory just as much as yours. It doesn’t exclusively prove that the brain, as a mind-independent ‘thing’, produces the mind.

If our perceptions are representations of ideas and those ideas are from minds, then we should expect to see neural activity corresponding to that mental activity from the side of our perceptions (which would include our use of brain scans). We should expect that our bodies are extrinsic representations of our minds in short.

What is your reason for believing that consciousness is not caused by the brain?

Because one can never reduce one’s qualitative experience to the quantitative, which I outlined here:

The form is as follows: “consciousness is [set of biological functions] because [set of biological functions] impacts consciousness [in this set of manners]”. That is the form of argumentation that a reductive naturalist methodology can afford and, upon close examination, there is a conceptual gap between consciousness being impacted in said manners and the set of biological functions (responsible for such impact) producing consciousness

Because it isn’t reducible and granted a full enumeration of all possible metaphysical theories (i.e., physicalism, idealism, substance dualism, and property dualism), it is less parsimonious, in short, to posit the brain as producing mind as it is to account for the world as mind-dependent (within a universal mind). In short, idealism accounts for the world better than physicalism (and the other theories.

How will this line of thinking help society?

I think it helps the same way as any other view: it attempts to give the best explanation of what reality fundamentally is. It can be useful to have a metaphysical theory in one’s back pocket (although, admittedly, some people live just fine without it).

I think it also helps us get past the dogmatic physicalist slumber we have been in for a while (ever since the age of enlightenment). And now we explore non-dogmatically consciousness as, at least, a possible candidate of the fundamental structure of reality.

Or is it merely that you just don't see the logical connections, and believe such conclusions are premature and prevent us from discovering the real alternative?

This is true as well in a sense: most people nowadays just consider consciousness an aftermath of the real world, of which can be thusly easily passed over as not so important; but there is a lot we don’t understand, of which I think we scientifically could investigate just not in the traditional methods, about it: a copernican revolution awaits us.

My approach to philosophy has always been to make greater sense of the general understanding of the world. To take our common language, clarify it, and get rid of the skepticism or ambiguity that causes confusion at a deeper level.

My approach is similar, but less emphasis on conforming to societies norms and language. I try to keep it simple, but I do not fear venturing out if I need to to get at the truth.

Paradigm shifts like yours seem like radical departures from the norm, and I've always wondered at the motivation for such

To be honest, I think idealism could be just as intuitive to people as physicalism in a different society. I think that whichever becomes predominent, the other view is thereby way harder for the masses to comprehend because they can’t step out of their own metaphysical commitments to tackle the other metaphysical theory in its own terms. For me, I know that it took me a long time to take idealism seriously.

The motivation is to give the best general account of reality while increasing explanatory power and decreasing complexity. That’s pretty much it. I just think it accounts for the world in which we live better.

This disagreement is also done in full respect Bob! Fantastic thinking was had by all sides, and I have a much better respect for your position now that I understand better the nature of your definitions and outlook.

As always: same goes to you my friend! I always enjoy our conversations.

Bob

Quoting Philosophim

it did not counter my point which refutes that.

You did not refute it.

Quoting Philosophim

I've shown it

You did not show it.

Your arguments are idiosyncratic and you quote no sources.

Quoting Wayfarer

I stand by the basic claim that numbers, logical principles, and the like, cannot be explained in terms of the interactions of matter.

Saying this unironically, in the process of posting on the Internet, is hard to fathom from my perspective.

Do you think that computers do not deal with numbers and apply logical principles, or do you think that the processes occurring in computers cannot be explained in terms of the interactions of matter, or...?

Heh, ok Wayfarer. I know when I have or haven't countered something and I admit I'm wrong or mistaken rather often. Truth is more important to me then "winning". Believe it wasn't countered if you want, but it most certainly was.

If you want to go into detail explaining why my point didn't counter yours, feel free, I'll re-engage. Until then, no worry, I'll catch you in another thread.

Quoting wonderer1

Do you think that computers do not deal with numbers and apply logical principles, or do you think that the processes occurring in computers cannot be explained in terms of the interactions of matter, or...?

It's part of a larger argument, that I've tried to develop here and elsewhere.

First, as regards computers, I think their capacities can be explained solely in terms of the physical sciences, but then, they're human artefacts. Humans invented them to perform tasks, and they do that extraordinarily well, mainly through the miracle of miniturisation which has allowed billions of transistors to be accomodated on a chip the size of a fingernail. No argument that they're not physical, but then, they are not beings. They're devices that can now emulate, among other things, some aspects human intelligence (and indeed I am now using ChatGPT on a daily basis). The reason they exist is because we imbue them with some aspects of our own intelligence, and interpret their output by the same means.

The larger argument is that logic comprises solely the relationship of ideas, and cannot be reduced to the physical. Here I am drawing on the argument from reason. The argument from reason challenges naturalism, which is the belief that all phenomena, including human thoughts and reasoning, can be explained solely in terms of natural, physical processes (such as physical interactions). According to this argument, if naturalism were true, reasoning can be explained in terms of neurochemistry, on the basis of material or efficient causation. And it this is true, reason could be described as the output of physical processes, devoid of purpose or intentionality. But the very ability to reason and to engage in rational discourse presupposes the existence of intentionality and purpose, and the ability to grasp abstractions (such as if...then). Reasoning involves judgement, making logical inferences, and seeking truth. If our thoughts were simply the result of physical causation, they would lack the ability to genuinely apprehend truth or to be rationally justified. (I think this is why Daniel Dennett continually teases the idea of humans as moist robots.)

Arguments of this kind have been pursued by Christian apologists such as C S Lewis and Alvin Plantinga, however, I have no interest in using them for any theistic reason, only to show how materialism itself undercuts something essential about the nature of reason. A similar line of argument is found in Thomas Nagel's essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, which argues in a similar vein about ascribing the faculty of reason solely to evolutionary biology:

[quote=Thomas Nagel]The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts* one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions.[/quote]

*'Stepping outside' them means seeking to explain them in other terms, e.g. as the products of evolutionary adaptation or the result of neurochemical interactions.

Quoting Wayfarer

It's part of a larger argument, that I've tried to develop here and elsewhere.

Thanks for the outline.

Part of me wants to dive into discussing it further, and another part is saying I should allocate my time better. So I'm going to pass on diving in. At least for now.

Reply to wonderer1 Yes, my wife also says that quite often :wink:

Reply to Wayfarer Mine too … but she is more blunt than that! :D

Reply to I like sushi She says, sarcastically, ‘still playing with your invisible friends?’ I do try and point out that discussing philosophy is, you know, not like selling drugs or guns or many of the other egregious things that people do online, but it doesn’t impress her…..

Reply to Wayfarer

What do you mean? This place is full of people pushing all kinds of mind altering stuff.

Reply to wonderer1 I meant, my wife corresponds to the part of you that is saying you should allocate your time better...

Reply to Wayfarer

I should have pared down what I quoted.

My response was intended as allusion to, "not like selling drugs".

I got the wife comment.