Logical proof that the hard problem of consciousness is impossible to solve
Let's first assume that the hard problem of consciousness is not the lack of scientific knowledge in that domain but the paradox it creates when thinking of consciousness as an object in the world. Any materialistic theories about it is followed by this question "why are these materialistic phenomena accompanied by experience?". And any materialistic attempt to answer that question also ends up being followed by the same question, creating a circularity that seems impossible to escape.
To me, this type of reasoning implies impossible premises. And to show that, let's first start with possible premises. We know that:
1) One indispensable element for the perception of objects is consciousness.
2) Time flows in one direction.
The logical conclusion from this is that consciousness cannot be viewed solely as an object since it has to be there for the perception of objects. Consciousness can only be viewed as consciousness (cannot be broken down into something else since it is always there as a whole in our reasoning).
However, when we ask ourselves why are these materialistic phenomena accompanied by experience?, we trigger a self referential explanation that has no other outcome than being circular because it circles back to incorrect premises that contradict the rest of the reasoning.
It can do so by contradicting the first premise: imagining that we can be detached from consciousness, that we can study it from an outside point of view without having to use it in the explanation (which we do, the moment we have thoughts about it ). In other words, its like trying to understand what the logical connector and means without using it in the explanation. Which is literally impossible since we reason by connecting things, and this connection is just another word, or a more complex version of and. "And" cannot be broken down into smaller concepts, just like consciousness (as in the feeling of it) can't.
Going against the second premise is a bit stretched. It seems that people sometimes either forget that something cannot exist prior to its conception, or can reason with a distorted vision of time, leading them to enter a reasoning of how something was created as if it did not already exist and was not used throughout the reasoning. As if things could exist and not exist at the same time.
It's kind of like the liar paradox this sentence is false that implies the attribution of a truth value before the sentence is created, which creates some kind of weird time distortion where future and past events get mixed up and circle back to each other because they are contradictive.
"This sentence" refers to a future reference which is "this sentence is false". So it's attributing a truth value to itself that is not constructed yet. And the analysis after the creation contradicts the analysis based on events that did not happen yet so it's continuously changed
The only "solution" that doesnt imply impossible premises is to consider this premise:
3) Other beings could visualise objects without consciousness
Which would imply that they would be able to view our consciousness as an object, without the self reference to consciousness. Although there is nothing that guarantees that their vision of objects is similar to ours.
In this light, it is possible to see that consciousness could be completely material and a sort of illusion, although we cannot make sense of the idea and that the hard problem of consciousness will always remain for those who try to visualise consciousness as an object. So there is no actual "solution".
It seems like it's only a problem because impossible premises are used. With "possible" premises, it just seems like consciousness (as in the subjective experience) is a building block of our mind that we cannot reason without.
To me, this type of reasoning implies impossible premises. And to show that, let's first start with possible premises. We know that:
1) One indispensable element for the perception of objects is consciousness.
2) Time flows in one direction.
The logical conclusion from this is that consciousness cannot be viewed solely as an object since it has to be there for the perception of objects. Consciousness can only be viewed as consciousness (cannot be broken down into something else since it is always there as a whole in our reasoning).
However, when we ask ourselves why are these materialistic phenomena accompanied by experience?, we trigger a self referential explanation that has no other outcome than being circular because it circles back to incorrect premises that contradict the rest of the reasoning.
It can do so by contradicting the first premise: imagining that we can be detached from consciousness, that we can study it from an outside point of view without having to use it in the explanation (which we do, the moment we have thoughts about it ). In other words, its like trying to understand what the logical connector and means without using it in the explanation. Which is literally impossible since we reason by connecting things, and this connection is just another word, or a more complex version of and. "And" cannot be broken down into smaller concepts, just like consciousness (as in the feeling of it) can't.
Going against the second premise is a bit stretched. It seems that people sometimes either forget that something cannot exist prior to its conception, or can reason with a distorted vision of time, leading them to enter a reasoning of how something was created as if it did not already exist and was not used throughout the reasoning. As if things could exist and not exist at the same time.
It's kind of like the liar paradox this sentence is false that implies the attribution of a truth value before the sentence is created, which creates some kind of weird time distortion where future and past events get mixed up and circle back to each other because they are contradictive.
"This sentence" refers to a future reference which is "this sentence is false". So it's attributing a truth value to itself that is not constructed yet. And the analysis after the creation contradicts the analysis based on events that did not happen yet so it's continuously changed
The only "solution" that doesnt imply impossible premises is to consider this premise:
3) Other beings could visualise objects without consciousness
Which would imply that they would be able to view our consciousness as an object, without the self reference to consciousness. Although there is nothing that guarantees that their vision of objects is similar to ours.
In this light, it is possible to see that consciousness could be completely material and a sort of illusion, although we cannot make sense of the idea and that the hard problem of consciousness will always remain for those who try to visualise consciousness as an object. So there is no actual "solution".
It seems like it's only a problem because impossible premises are used. With "possible" premises, it just seems like consciousness (as in the subjective experience) is a building block of our mind that we cannot reason without.
Comments (188)
So I agree that "....the hard problem of consciousness is impossible to solve", but I don't see the logical proof because it seems we are talking about two different things both referred to as consciousness.
Well, I'm also talking about the " first person experience", and people who explore the hard problem of consciousness are also talking about this, aren't they?
Quoting kazan
Dreams and hallucinations are often considered to be altered state of consciousness, so it's still consciousness. But it's interesting because a lot of things we associate with consciousness can disappear in these states, like the self awareness can become very fleeting, or the sense of reality.
What or where could anything be but in the world?
If you assume, for example, that the feeling of hunger is non-physical, then it's paradoxical to think of the feeling as an object in the physical world. But why would you? I don't know of a good reason to split the feeling of hunger from the hunger.
The feeling does not merely accompany the physiology, it has a hierarchical structure in the sense that it emerges from its constitutive lower-level functions in the brain, which in turn are causally constrained by hormones, the level of glucose in the blood, and an empty stomach. The feeling of hunger is not detached from an empty stomach, they're parts of the same structure.
1 yes and 2 no. I believe the two of us are talking about the same thing. But most people, and especially everybody I've seen here so far, seems to talk about consciousness as an object. To me that implies they are talking about something different than I am. Wayfarer yesterday jumped from intelligence to consciousness as if it is the same thing. If two people are not talking about the same thing, no logical argument makes sense.
I wonder if most people ever have tried to simply be aware of their own consciousness (yes, that IS circular). Most people, and especially here on the forum, are so caught up in thinking that they only can have a conceptual understanding of consciousness. No wonder you never can say anything sensible about the topic.
In other words, we ever be able to duplicate the experience of being another person? Or an animal? An insect? Because despite all of our capability to study the actions of a consciousness, we can't 'experience' what its like to be that consciousness. Its very much like the question of, "What does it feel like to be water?" We say its not conscious because of its behavior, but what is it to BE water?
Lets say that one day we're able to replicate what seems to be consciousness from the brain. How do we objectively determine this? Do we don a helmet on another person and ask them, "We're emulating your consciousness. Does this feel what its like to be you?" Beyond the fact that it would be a conscious being thinking about the consciousness outside of their consciousness, where's the objective test? The measurements that don't rely on subjective experience? They don't exist. Because to know what its like to be conscious is a subjective experience. There is no objective measure but the honesty of the subject itself. And can such experiences be communicated in words? Can the person experiencing a perfect replica of the consciousness as a third party observer really have the full experience?
If anyone tells you, "The hard problem is proving that the brain causes consciousness," they misunderstand. It isn't even "Why does this cause concsiousness" that's the hard problem either. Its really saying, "How can we objectively measure and explore the purely subjective experience of being conscious?" With our current understanding of science, we can't.
I believe this is the point Skalidris is making: it is not about the advances in science. Even defining consciousness leads to problems.
I personally believe it is even more simple, we are not talking about the same "thing". Any thought experiment you try will fail on me, because you are not talking about the sense of being conscious, but about the content of that consciousness. For me consciousness is the 'container'. The only way to access it directly is by 10 seconds of non-thinking.
It's not so much about whether things "actually" are physical or not but about our representation of what's physical. And since that representation requires consciousness, it's impossible to imagine consciousness solely as an object in the world because that reasoning already implies consciousness to view it as an object, creating a self reference. Do you know what I mean?
Whether physical or not physical, consciousness cannot be viewed as anything other than consciousness because it's there in any reasoning we have.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
Interesting.
It seems that we're talking about the same problem, what you're describing also arises from the problem that our consciousness is like a building block in our mind, that we cannot escape it. We'll never know what it is like to be someone else's consciousness because we're only aware of ours, and it's there all the time, in any reasoning we have, so it's impossible to imagine what it would be like with another building block. Any thoughts we would have about it implies our consciousness, not someone else's, so it's impossible to know.
Quoting Philosophim
Well we can't, however advanced sciences become, that's what this "logical proof" is about.
I only put that because perhaps one day we will actually be able to know what its like to be someone else. But with the knowledge we have today, this is the hard logical limit of our understanding, and thus we have an issue of objectively evaluating subjective experience.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
Correct. We can monitor and map your brain to when you say you experience consciousness. We can map the brain to your behaviors, and even note what you are thinking before you are aware of it. But we cannot know what it is like to BE you. To BE your consciousness.
Correct.
Quoting Skalidris
Never say never! Yes, this seems impossible today. But science is full of 'making the impossible possible'. Did we conceive that cell phones would exist 300 years ago? That mankind would ever be able to travel to the moon? Judging what is possible in the future based on what we know today has a history of throwing egg on the face of our collective human race. :)
This is why it is viable to call it 'the hard problem' instead of 'the impossible problem'.
Just for the record, that isn't the standard way of stating the problem, and it isn't David Chalmers' way (he coined the phrase). You can listen to Chalmers describe it here: He defines the problem as "how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences in the mind." When we solve this problem (I do believe it's when, not if) we may or may not know "what it's like" to be someone else. That's a separate, though perhaps related, issue.
To know "what it's like" to be someone is to experience what they experience. Such experiential knowledge cannot be gained through propositional knowledge of how experience works. There is no mystery or paradox in this, of course, and as you note, this is not the "hard problem."
Quoting JRather, an interesting dilemma [I]would[/I] follow from the idea of "experiencing what X [someone else] experiences," if it was possible to experience what X experiences. I don't suspect that will ever be possible, regardless off what the solution to the Hard Problem turns out to be.
It's all very strange to think about, eh? Could someone telepathically share their experience with me without also sharing all of their memories that make the particular experience what it is? Would the feeling of nostalgia automatically come with all relevant memories, since they must be actively remembered to some degree for them to feel it? Or would I get just the feeling, and not know what it's about?
It doesn't imply that. For Chalmers, who came up with the hard problem, consciousness is not an object but a property of objects (and distinct from physical properties by its nature). So, your argument is a bit like saying it's logically impossible to prove the existence of time because it's an object in the world and we can't perceive it as such because each act of perception is a static measurement that never captures its flow. The way you've framed the problem may create a logical impossibility, but I think that's an issue with the framing. It may turn out to be that the problem is insoluble for other reasons or that it may be a conceptual issue (more of a non-problem), but I don't see logical impossibility applying here.
Correct. I'm noting it in a way that avoids the standard confusion of, "So we don't know if the brain causes consciousness? Its the subjective point that needs focusing on for most people. Because we cannot currently objectively know what a subjective experience is like, this makes it incredibly hard to say, "This is the subjective experience the brain has, and this is the objective physical brain mapping that causes it."
Consciousness, as a behavior, is capable of being mapped to the brain and is the "easy problem". We can monitor your brain, vitals, and behavior and say, "Objectively, they're in pain". But can we objectively say, "And this is their subjective experience of pain"? No. That's the hard problem.
This would require a little more than improvements in transportation or communication This would require that our mind is restructured in a way that does not require consciousness to be a building block in our mind. And even if that is managed, this would be replaced by another building block and we would then face the same problem for this other building block. We use tools from our mind to understand the world, just like in the Lego analogy I explained later in this message, and its impossible to explain these tools when all we have to do so are the same tools were trying to explain...
Quoting Baden
You're comparing apples and oranges. You're talking about the inability to understand something because we would assume that we don't have the right tools in our mind (which couldn't be a certainty solely based on logic), and I'm talking about the inability to understand something because it's self referential. We need consciousness to think, therefore we need consciousness to make any inference about consciousness, that's the problem.
Imagine a child is trying to figure out how a plastic Lego brick was made, but all they have to work with are other Lego bricks. The child could build something that looks like a drilling rig out of the bricks and they can pretend that this rig drills deep into the ground to extract some natural substance (also made of bricks) and then use another set of bricks to build a pretend fire, imagining that the substance is somehow broken down by the fire to create the bricks themselves. But the child can't actually break down or change the bricks. They're trying to use the very bricks they're made of to explain how those bricks came into being, which creates the self-referential problem. The hard problem of the Lego brick could be that whatever they try to build, theyll have no way to actually check if what they built is truly like whats happening in reality because theyll never be able to actually build a brick.
Even if we can study our brain and associate phenomena with consciousness, our understanding of it is made through consciousness, through this subjective notion in our mind. And breaking down consciousness is impossible: it's always there as a whole, at least if we consider the whole to be the experience of the subject (you could study altered states of consciousness to learn more about the missing elements in these experiences).
That is your particular intepretation of the problem. David Chalmers original paper doesnt say that. He says that understanding the specific functional aspects of consciousness and their correlation with neural processes are comparatively easy:
[quote=Chalmers; https://consc.net/papers/facing.html]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. ...
There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically.... If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem.[/quote]
Compare with:
He surveys a number of proposed causal links between brain and conscious experience and finds them wanting. Further on he says:
Quoting Chalmers
Which he proposes as a 'naturalistic dualism'. He never states that the problem is what it is like to be a conscious individual that isnt ourselves. His key point is the emphasis on 'experience' which is by nature first-person. That could be intepreted as saying that 'we can't directly know the experience of another person', but he doesn't directly state it.
The stumbling block for the objective sciences - the actual problem that has to be faced up to - is that experience is not objective, as the OP kind of says. Consciousness is the property of the subject to whom the experience occurs, so the exclusive emphasis on objective, third-party measurement which is the backbone of modern scientific method can't accomodate it. Which is why elminativism wants to eliminate it.
Quoting Philosophim
But the nature of that causal relationship is the very heart of the issue. Physicalism assumes that it possess an in-principle explanation, but that is what is being called into question.
Correct, I was not quoting Chalmers. And its not an incorrect interpretation of the problem either, set for a layman's understanding. At the core of the hard problem, the issue is that we cannot objectively evaluate subjective experience, or what it is like to be another being. I go into more depth in some other posts here, see if my answers jive or not.
Quoting Wayfarer
If we were able to objectively evaluate the subjective experience of an individual, we would have no hard problem. He doesn't have to say those exact words to understand the reason behind his claim.
Quoting Wayfarer
Right, we cannot objectively evaluate subjective experience. So since we can't use objectivity in regards to 'what it is like to be the consciousness', we have to use non-objective terms. He can use the word dualism if he wants, but he's not implying that subjective consciousness isn't physical or some 'other'. He's just noting there's no objective way to evaluate the subjective experience of being consciousness in physical terms, as we have no way of evaluating what its like to be something we are not.
The point is to hammer home that the hard problem is not, "Is our consciousness in our brains?" Yes, it is. There is no soul, or other essence as neuroscience has shown repeatedly. It just means that we cannot objectively talk about the subjective experience of being conscious, because we have no way of objectively knowing what the personal experience a person is feeling when they say, "I feel pain". We can see their bodily reactions, their actions, and their brain functions, but we cannot currently understand what that 'feeling' is, unless we are that person themself. Perusing through your Chalmer's quotes, I don't see where I'm at odds, so we might be in agreement here.
He jolly well is!
Chalmers asks:
That 'extra ingredient' is missing from physical explanations:
So he's explicitly rejecting physical reductionism.
I might as well try and spell this out, as it's been a bone of contention between us in many debates. There is a deep philosophical problem here. To say that mind is not reducible to physical constituents, is not to posit some ethereal substance or 'ghost in the machine' (if that is what 'soul' means to you). That view is grounded in Cartesian dualism, which posited body as extended but mindless substance and mind (res cogitans) as non-extended pure intelligence. Cartesian dualism is written deeply into the fabric of modern philosophy and science. In general terms, in the following centuries, science tended to res cogitans as an incoherent idea, and to concentrate on material causes, res extensa, as the ground of explanation in natural science. And I think that is in the back of your mind whenever we get into this topic. That is why for you, and for many others, it is axiomatic that the mind has to be understood in terms of physical (or neurological) causation.
I don't think Chalmers is trying to suggest that there is a soul or essence in that sense. I'm certainly not trying to resurrect a Cartesian soul! But I also think that the physicalist picture that arises from denying the reality of consciousness (in effect) is also mistaken, because it's grounded in faulty premisses from the outset, on an artifical distinction between abstractions. Rather, the whole picture of Cartesian dualism, and the physical reductionism that descended from it, has to be called into question. That is the philosophical background as I see it.
Yes, and that extra ingredient is the inability to objectively grasp other subjective experiences. Again, this does not mean there is some actual essence we're missing. It means we are at a limitation of what we can evaluate objectively: the personal subjective experience. This does not mean subjective experiences aren't physical. We can evaluate a brain objectively and state, "According to what we know of behavior, this brain is in pain." We just can't objectively state 'how that brain is personally experiencing pain'.
Quoting Wayfarer
There is nothing faulty with the physical evaluation of consciousness and the brain in observed outcomes and behaviors. Give a person anasthesia, and you can knock them unconscious. We can know personally what its like to be knocked unconscious, but we cannot objectively know what its like for another brain to experience being knocked unconscious. The physical experience does not deny that a consciousness has a subjective component, it simply understands that objectively explaining the personal experience itself is outside of the realm of testing, as we need to know what its like for another consciousness to be that consciousness.
Its really just a variation of the old, "I see green, you see green, but do we really experience the same color?" Does this mean that green is not a wavelength of light, or that our conception of green in daily use is faulty? No. We still have physical eyes, and physical brains that interpret that light into the subjective experience of 'green'. We could poke around in your brain and trigger you into saying, "I see a green tree," We just can't objectively know what the personal experience of 'I see a green tree' is to you specifically.
The problem is the 'hard problem' has been used far too often by people to mean more than it is stating. It does not deny the physical reality of consciousness that has been discovered by neuroscience. You are your brain. The question is, "Can we objectively understand your brain as a subjective experience?" That's currently outside of what we can objectively know, and may never know, at least in our lifetimes.
Its not a difficult concept, but people try to make it difficult because they think its a way to make us more than our brains. Its not. The only way we're going to get that answer is continual research into neuroscience. Philosophy may have more to bring to the table, but I'm not seeing any further discoveries from this line of thinking.
I'm interested in how Neurolink is developing for example. This is a great article on the idea of how it will feel. https://medium.com/swlh/neuralink-what-do-isobars-feel-like-when-they-move-ff3070198263
Here's an article on the first patient playing Mario kart with the Neurolink: https://www.pcmag.com/news/neuralink-patient-also-uses-brain-chip-to-play-mario-kart
As we can see, the physical brain and consciousness is alive and well in terms of behavior and interfacing with other forms of reality like computer chips. What does THAT feel like? What brain activity are they recording to do that? This is the exciting stuff we should be thinking and talking about. Will we be able to achieve the science fiction dream/nightmare of having chip interfaces do more for us like access memory, help regulate our emotions, and more? Will all of this data through multiple chip use begin to map out the brain in ways we haven't imagined yet? If we want philosophy to stay relevant, we need to follow the discoveries that are being made today, or find some way to push science into areas we want to explore like 'personal experiences'.
You're still not seeing the point, though. There is some ability to infer some obvious physiological correlations like pain or epilepsy from neuroscience, but you still fall back on the assumption that subjective experiences are still ultimately physical, without addressing the real crux of the issue: the first-person, qualitative aspect of experience that resists explanation by objective, third-person descriptions. Even if we can identify some neural correlateslike specific brain states that accompany pain, color perception, or emotionsthese correlations dont explain why or how those states are accompanied by conscious experience, and there's no actual theory that does so. The subjective feel of pain, or what it is like to experience red, is not part of the objective description. That is the explanatory gap that you're explaining away by equating the subjective with the merely personal.
Quoting Philosophim
So to paraphrase, your response is, 'It's true that objective science can't capture personal experience, but it doesn't really matter. From brain science, we know that experience is basically physical in nature, let's hope philosophy catches up with that one day.'
You haven't explained why this creates a logical impossibility. The limitations of the child in the lego example don't seem to amount to a logical impossibility either. You're applying physical constraints and the absence of means of gathering evidence to the situation to make it practically or empirically impossible for the child to do something. It's like saying the detective can't solve the crime if you set up a scenario where the clues are out of his reach. Sure. Nothing to do with logical impossibility though. A logical impossibilty should entail a contracition in the laws of logic, like require a square circle or 2 + 2 to equal 5. It's a very high threshold on the impossibility ladder. Maybe, you mean metaphysical impossibility, something that cannot obtain in any possible world (due to our understanding of the basic principles of reality) but may still not violate the laws of logic (e.g. ex nihilo (causeless) creation), or conceptual impossibility to do with semantic contradictions (e.g. "a colourless green cup") etc. But I think you are drawing unjustified conclusions concerning the nature of possibility from the problem of self-referentiality here.
In any case, it's seems to be either a conceptual issue (an essentially linguistic problem) or an empirical issue (one that we can pursue scientifically). To Chalmers, and most others, it's empirical. The hard problem is to explain how the property of consciousness / subjectivity arises from physical matter (presumed to be in the brain) and, not only have empirically testable theories been put forward to examine that, actual experiments have been done. Here's a link to one avenue being explored: Testing Penrose's Theory of Consciousness
Again, to me your thesis isn't clear enough and rests on a muddled presentation of logical impossibility that is too quickly inferred from the self-referentiality issue you bring up.
Quoting Skalidris
What about: ''We need language to think, therefore we need language to make any inference about language, that's the problem. ''
Except it's not. Even though it's similarly self-referential. Self-referentiality does not necessarily entail logical contradiction.
Is this an impossible picture?
I really don't feel that you and I are that different in our intention here. Its been a while, but I've noted before that I am very open to a non-physical explanation of consciousness if there is evidence that there is. You and I may have a very different approach to 'what knowledge means', which is no surprise because its not exactly settled philosophy.
To me, knowledge is a tool, not an element of truth. Its an attempt by people to demonstrate a logic and process that gives us more confidence that what we say we know is more than a belief and wish. When I say, "We know that consciousness is from the brain," that can be translated to, "Everything we currently understand logically leads to consciousness coming from the brain. Its not that it couldn't be true that consciousness is apart from the brain, but there is not any viable evidence that demonstrates that its not."
Yes, I fully agree that neuroscience has not filled in all the gaps yet. But those gaps grow smaller every day. Pharmacology and neuroscience give us the knowledge in countless real world results that consciousness is a physical expression of the brain. Physical of course being matter and energy.
While we can muse about those gaps, prod, question, and study in the hopes of finding something different from the physical (which I encourage!) hypotheses and questions alone do not elevate themselves to knowledge, or even likely outcomes. There is the risk of creating a 'god of the gaps' here and stating, "Because we don't understand this fully yet, it has a viable chance of not being physical.' No, the reality is that its probably physical, as we've never encountered anything in life that isn't physical.
Its not that philosophy should 'catch up' or that science not being able to currently capture objective personal experience doesn't matter. Its the question of, 'What is philosophy contributing from these conclusions?' Is philosophy contributing a question with a genuine wish for an answer, spurring scientific tests, approaches, and real change in society? Or is philosophy trying to find something that isn't there, disguising wishes and fantasy as word play to keep some hope alive of a mortal shell that isn't shackled to physical reality? The former is what propels civilizations, while the latter keeps us in the dark ages.
My point is that our current knowledge of consciousness as a physical expression of the brain is solving real problems in the world. It works. It makes sense logically, and has decades of data and results behind it. Until there is evidence that subjective experience is something that isn't physical, it is safest and most logical to assume it is, even when we have gaps.
Something I've also mentioned before which I think philosophy should address is, "If consciousness is physical, what else can the physical do?" We are made up of matter, and yet this matter can get to a state in which it becomes aware, or functions in a way that we call 'life'. How much of a separation is there then from life and non-life? Is consciousness more ubiquitous than we believe?
If we can look at a brain and not see the picture that it envisions, what else are we looking at and not realizing what's going on internally? Does fire have a feeling? Could it be the old idea of 'the spirits of nature' was in some limited way, not that far off the mark? Are local ecosystems living in a way we don't see? After all, a brain is a bunch of interconnected neurons. Do the connections of the people in a city make a consciousness that we can never observe? What do these five brain cells experience, and will they ever be cognizant of their contribution to the consciousness that is 'me'?
The noting of the current limitations of science being able to objectively capture personal experience are just that, a limit. We should not be pulling the wrong conclusions from this limit. We should be asking ourselves if that means our conception of consciousness transcends to other forms of matter that we've discounted. But I find no good logic or arguments that lead us to question whether consciousness is physical. Again, anything is plausible, but we should not elevate the unlikely and non-evidenced suppositions as being in any reasonable competition with what we know today. Its been a good discussion Wayfarer!
Of course, the analogy isnt perfect, and here, it requires some elements to simply be out of reach for a human while it seems that other humans can reach it: after all, the plastic bricks are made by humans so naturally its not impossible to break down plastic But it shows that a system has its limits based on how its made. Our mind is made out of neurons and the way the neurons communicate and the way the neural networks are built present limitations. Just like the child was limited to working with plastic bricks, our reasoning is limited by what it is made of.
If you want a more formal proof of this reasoning, its the same principle as Gödels incompleteness theorems: any consistent formal system capable of arithmetic contains true statements that are unprovable within that system. The self reference problem brings contradictions when you're trying to prove something by using that thing itself, just like with the liar paradox, just like the hard problem of consciousness.
But isnt it intuitively obvious? We explain things by breaking them down, its either a bottom-up or a top down but every explanation implies breaking things down into elements and explaining how the elements interact together. We know that any reasoning implies consciousness and that we cant break it down, this subject experience is always there as a whole I think the problem might arise from the illusion that sciences can break down consciousness, because were making a lot of hypothesis about its parts, but we seem to forget that every single one of these hypothesis was made using consciousness as a whole
Quoting SophistiCat
Why would it be an impossible picture? It is possible to take a photograph of a painter and his art.
It might not really be that fundamental to philosophy.
Try starting with a more fundamental idea
Do physical and non-physical things exist.
I think if we assume physical things exist the next question is how non-physical things can exist.
They can't by definition.
Non-physical, to me, means non existent.
So a good approach is to identify non-physicals as physically contained non-physicals.
Brains holding mental content.
That gets closer to what consciousness is.
Not just any type of physical matter, but the special case of brains holding non-physical content.
And examining the context we see full input and output capabilities, connections with the biological organism, location in space and time, that is fully consistent with what consciousness is.
So what consciousness is, and other things like information, can be understood by using the idea of physically contained non-physical objects.
Not sure that's news, but maybe to some. In anything Chalmers related, consciousness refers to brains in a physical state.
My main point is that the hard problem really is a secondary problem. The question of physically contained non-physicals is primary to understanding consciousness.
So it doesn't take place in the dark, in your sleep or when you are dead because all the biological functions need to be in place for consciousness to be fully developed.
Not sure what in the dark means? Unconscious?
They're not that. There are limitations to scientific method in this respect as a matter of principle, which you're not seeing. It requires a different kind of approach to what has been up until now understood as scientific method.
Quoting Philosophim
:roll:
What I think is meant by 'physical' simply means 'objective' - what can be sensed, measured, analysed by objective methods and instruments. Yet at the bottom of 'physical matter' we nowadays find abstractions, and indeed the whole model of particle physics is grounded in mathematical abstractions.
Phenomenology is grounded on that awareness. The phenomenological method is grounded in awareness of the nature of first-person experience, but not from an objective or 'outside' stance but by attention to the quality of experience in a moment-by-moment basis. It is related to ancient philosophical skepticism, which 'withholds judgement about that which is not evident'.
Quoting Key Ideas in Phenomenology
David Chalmers recognises that phenomenology must be 'absolutely central' to a properly-constituted science of conciousness.
Obviously we cannot physically model what we think of as "subjective experience" or "being conscious" or any other conceptual generality or abstraction. It doesn't follow that such things are in any meaningful sense non-physical, that is not dependent in any way on any physical process, or that they are just what they intuitively seem to be.
Quoting Wayfarer
All you seem to be saying here is that the brain is not merely an (inert) object. There are many things which are not mere objects in that sense.
That the Quoting Wayfarer doesn't entail that what is being modeled are mathematical abstractions.
Non-physical, to me, means non-physical. I wouldn't see how the fact that there are physical things rules out the possibility that there are non-physical things.
My version is:
Physical things exist.
Non-physical things do not exist.
Physically contained non-physicals do exist.
Or mental content....
For example the future doesn't physically exist.
But the idea of the future does exist as mental content.
It would be hard to build a model of consciousness without physically contained non-physicals.
For you the question is in what form do non-physical things exist? If physical matter isn't involved there is no physical form.
But as a concept a non-physical always is mental content so is physically contained.
It seems relevant...and a starting point...for understanding consciousness.
Yes. Pretty sure. Without exception.
Addition: Instantiated is a better word and is what I meant.
Not sure.
It's real in the sense that a brain must physically configure and process specific content.
But other than that the content has no physical form.
It might be human nature to think our own mental world is more real than it really is. So I think reminding...us...ourselves, gives a good perspective. But a lot of it is real so brains keep us safe too....
Forms are not just the shapes of physical things; they are the essential principles that particular things must conform to in order to exist. For instance, the concept of 'wings'a structure for flighthas emerged independently across insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals. The form of a wing is determined by the function of flight. This form, understood as an abstract principle, pre-exists physical wings. It represents the necessary conditions that must be realized for flight, rather than being derived from physical matter.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
While concepts such as wings or circles are grasped by the mind, they are not merely products of the mind. They exist as forms independently of their physical manifestations. The mind may indeed correlate with brain activity, but the claim that the mind 'is the product of' the brain is precisely what the hard problem of consciousness calls into question. The relationship between brain and mind remains a mystery, and it is worth considering that the brain might enable conscious acts might actually drive evolutionary processes. Greater intelligence provides greater possibilities for the organism, suggesting that the brain is a product of the minds ability to conceptualize and act within the world, as much as a cause.
This does not posit 'non-material' things or forces, but constraints, which are top-down rather than simply bottom-up. Living things, generally, are shaped by both of those factors, not simply by physical (bottom up) causation. Most of what you and @Philosophim are saying, is a consequence of the 'Cartesian duality', with it's artificial model of matter and 'non-material substance', as explained in this earlier post. It seems natural to you, because it is deeply embedded in our way of seeing things.
I don't think I follow any conventional dualism.
It's just forced on us that non-physicals need to be paired with physical brains.
If we can't use non-physicals we don't have normal time perception or understanding of distant events. It would only be here and now.
I can't see anyway concepts could predate brains.
How? There isn't a physical mechanism.
Sure you do. It's implied in everthing you write. Whatever is being forced on you, is doing so by virtue of your prior commitment to the sole reality of the physical.
Quoting Philosophim
What if there is not only individualized what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods but also a one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood both universal and constant?
With this supposition, we can say that what-it's-like-to-be a bat living in a cave is the same as what-it's-like-to-be a human living in a college dorm.
Speculating about this possibility doesn't necessarily imply the sense of a world populated by individual what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods is illusory. No. It's a point-of-view that allows us to ask what's the relationship between the one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood and the individual what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods.
In our speculation about the possible existence of a one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood, we can ask ourselves what's going on when we sympathize with the suffering of another person. Morals are about doing no harm to other innocent beings. How can we value this principle governing our behavior if we don't have some semblance of a one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood that we access and utilize to support the sympathy that fuels our moral thinking and behavior?
How is it that many humans easily shuttle between an individualized selfhood and the one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood that enables the bonding of friendship and love so important in their lives?
The edifice of the arts (literature, drama, music, dance, painting, sculpture) depends upon the interpersonal identification of artist, art work and audience. Is this not, to some observable degree, a communal experience wherein the one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood exerts a very useful and desirable power?
When we think about knowing what it's like to walk a mile in another man's shoes, we must acknowledge that, obviously, we're really experiencing what it's like to be ourselves being aware of what it's like to be another, separate self.
From this realization we see that, as already said here, our consciousness is, for each of us, insuperable. Well, what if the insuperability of individualized what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods can merge with all other insuperable what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods to form a universal and constant one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood also insuperable?
So, after all, maybe we really do know all what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods. Isn't this access to all what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods the underlying assumption that supports the edifice of morality?
Doesn't morality lose it's existential imperative within our justice-governed lives without it?
Another, possibly important speculation, goes as follows: the foundation of consciousness is memory. Memory consists of feedback loops traversing neuronal brain circuits that empower awareness of things and events via the initial perception of things and events in themselves repeated for comparison and re-presentation so that the thing in itself becomes a perceived thing in itself and, after another, vertically stacked feedback loop creating a higher-order feedback loop tower per unit of time, we arrive at the self knowing it's perceiving a re-presentation of a thing-in-itself, as based on an original thing-in-itself.
This higher-order feedback loop tower per unit of time is the necessary circularity of consciousness examining itself. So, the circularity of consciousness examining itself is the friend of our understanding of consciousness, not its enemy.
The friendliness of the circularity of consciousness examining itself resides in the conjectured phenomenon of consciousness itself being a possibly irreducible circularity making the selfhood of consciousness possible.
If this is the case, then, of course, examination of the nature of consciousness entails circularity.
Heres the takeaways: a) lets not assume that individualized what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods have impenetrable membranes. Maybe the membrane of selfhood is semi-permeable, as evidenced by human sympathy; b) lets assume that the innate circularity of the self is part of a multi-tiered tower of levels of consciousness that can merge and divide such that the individualized what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods and the one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood are not mutually exclusive.
There aren't a lot of options.
Physical matter exists or not.
Non-physicals exist or not.
Physically instantiated non-physicals exist or not.
Do you have alternatives?
This seems like nonsense to me. It is the physical conditions for example the density of the air and the intensity of gravity that determine what forms will work as wings.
It is not "the concept of 'wings'" that has emerged independently across species. It is the different viable forms of wing that have emerged independently constrained by actual physical conditions.
If I don't see it, try to show me. What is the different kind of approach you wish to propose? Otherwise this is retreating into your own mind, and I cannot follow.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have nothing against questioning these assumptions. The physical world is matter and energy. To have something non-physical, you would need something that does not fit in the category of matter and energy. But questions and gaps alone are not an argument. We can doubt anything we want, including the fact we are ourselves. Maybe we're really possessed by some other being and only have the illusion of control. But such doubts are only plausibilities, and plausibilities are only limited by the imagination.
To have something more than a plausibility, there needs to be some viable angle beyond 'a doubt'. I've gone over a few with you before. Can we detect energy from thoughts? When we die is there some measurable essence that leaves the body? Are there things missing from the behavioral mode of consciousness that cannot be generally explained as, "You are your brain?" As far as I can tell, no. Get brain damaged, you become a different person. Get drunk? Your consciousness changes. Surgeons and psychiatric doctors have decades of real results from viewing consciousness as from the brain. So what specifically is missing that "You are your brain" cannot explain in terms of behavior?
When you say living organisms display attributes and characteristics that cannot be extracted from the laws of chemistry and physics alone, could you give some examples? Can you show that these examples invalidate the idea that, 'You are your brain?"
But its not. A bat can't speak for one thing. Its brain is also of a different type and size from a human being. It cannot have the same experience.
Quoting ucarr
Because whether we do harm to things or not should be more than feelings. Just because I feel disgust at something doesn't mean I should kill it. Just because something makes me happy doesn't mean I should embrace it. For me, it is a respect for its agency, the fact that despite all the odds that get thrown at every life, it has survived until now. Why should I harm or end it over something as trivial as just an emotion?
Quoting ucarr
There are plenty of people in life I don't understand. And I'm sure there are plenty of people in life who don't understand me. Bonding often comes from like goals. Survival, or accomplishing a task together require a closeness and understanding of another person up to a point to get this done. It does not require me to understand exactly what another person is experiencing in life.
Quoting ucarr
Art is highly interpretive. I think Starry Night from Van Gogh is overrated. Some underappreciated art I find immensely powerful. Many times we interpret art differently from what the artist intended. I have a friend who writes, and he frequently tells me his audience has feeling and expectations he never expected.
Quoting ucarr
No, I don't think so Ucarr. Being moral because you're alike is just sympathy for an extension of yourself. Being moral towards beings and people who are nothing like you is real as a logical set of guidelines for treatment of them.
Quoting ucarr
Its an interesting idea. I think we definitely need memory to form thoughts and analysis. But is memory doing the thinking and analysis, or is that something else?
Quoting Philosophim
To say that mind is not reducible to physical constituents, is not to posit some ethereal substance or 'ghost in the machine' (if that is what 'soul' means to you). That view is grounded in Cartesian dualism, which posited body as extended but mindless substance and mind (res cogitans) as non-extended pure intelligence. Cartesian dualism is written deeply into the fabric of modern philosophy and science. In general terms, in the following centuries, science tended to regard res cogitans as an incoherent idea, and to concentrate on material causes, res extensa, as the ground of explanation in natural science. And I think that is in the back of your mind whenever we get into this topic. That is why for you it is axiomatic that the mind has to be understood in terms of physical (or neurological) causation. It's because the alternative seems to be a 'thinking substance', which to you makes no sense. When physicalism is questioned, this is what you think is being proposed. I think your approach is very much influenced by that.
Quoting Philosophim
Information would be a good candidate in our scientific age. 'Information is information, not matter or energy', said one of founders of computer science. 'No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.' And information is clearly separate from matter. Why? Because the same information can be encoded in completely different material forms, and yet still retain its meaning.
Quoting Philosophim
When I say that living organisms display attributes and characteristics that cannot be extracted from the laws of chemistry and physics alone, I'm pointing to the fact that organisms are fundamentally different from machines. Unlike machines, which serve purposes imposed on them from the outside, living organisms exhibit intrinsic agency and functional autonomy. They actively maintain themselves through processes like homeostasis which enables them to differentiate themselves from their surroundings, unlike minerals or other non-organic materials. This self-maintenance and self-regulation give organisms an internal purposea drive to persist, adapt, and flourishthat is entirely absent in the purely extrinsic purposes of machines. This fundamental distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic purpose is key to understanding why organisms cannot be reduced to mere physical or chemical mechanisms. The whole system and its environment are deeply intertwined, making living systems more than just the sum of their parts.
Yes, the term really only makes sense at the macro-level. In the quantum sphere, the physical is as spooky as idealism sounds to materialists. So, physicalist fundamentalists kind of want to have their cake and eat it too (an ironic possibility only available to them if they were sub-atomic particles).
The fundamental reality of the physicalist boils down to, at the finest level, the mathematically inferred or imagined, not the empirically observable, and even the finest level of the empirically observable does not obey the rules on which the subtextual justification for physicalism rests, i.e. common sense interactions with wordly dry goods on a macro scale. Again, physicalists ride in on horses and expect to unproblematically ride out on unicorns. When questioned, they tell us unicorns are horses too, and so the equine world is united once more, and we can stop worrying about the ficititious animals of pesky dualists and idealists.
It's all so tiresome.
Quoting Philosophim
From the above I understand the theme of your response to my first of two main conjectures to be "difference." My counter-narrative to your theme is "continuity."
So, your narrative propounds the discontinuity of extra-categorical modal difference whereas my counter-narrative propounds the continuity of intra-categorical intra-modal connectedness.
Let me attempt to translate the above sentence into plain-spoken English: with your theme, a collection of things are grouped into separate categories, with the assumption there is no connectedness between the categories. As an example, consider a group of apples in one category and a group of oranges in another category.
What you have done, I think, is equate feelings with apples for one of your categories and equate thoughts with oranges for another one of your categories.
In my counter-narrative, I claim that feelings and thoughts belong to one category: cognition. The difference between these members of one category is by degree, and therefore not by category.
To elaborate, to have a feeling about something means having thought about something with a relatively small amount of detail, or low resolution. On the other hand, to have a profound understanding about something means having reflected on something towards amassing a large amount of detail, or high resolution.
When we compare low-resolution feelings with high-resolution thoughts, its like comparing a low-resolution digital image of something with a high-resolution version of the same image. That they are the same image establishes their mutual membership within one category: a specific image. The difference between them is not extra-categorical and modal, but rather intra-categorical and extensional.
The fancy logical term for your theme of difference by category is intentional: the properties that something needs to have in order to be counted as a member of a specified category.
Your theme argues that feelings and thoughts are intentionally disconnected; my theme argues that feelings and thought are intentionally connected.
That your theme overstates the difference of feelings and thoughts by degree with respect to difference-as-disconnection is evidenced by:
Quoting Philosophim
I assert this is an overstatement of the degree of difference_disconnection separating feelings from thoughts in terms of people understanding each other and moreover, it is therefore an overstatement of the degree of sameness_connection necessary for a human to know what its like to be a bat.
As you say, you can bond with another human without knowing exactly what its like to be the other person. Nonetheless, to a degree, you do know what its like to be another person. And likewise, to a degree, you do know what its like to be a bat.
Highly technical, very abstract thoughts about moral principles are directly connected to intuitive feelings about how we should treat other innocent beings. Without this direct connection, moral principles become empty and therefore meaningless.
I assert there is no impenetrable membrane called what-its-like-to-be-an-individualized-self. Its this mistaken belief that creates the hard problem. It's this mistaken belief that falsely divides subjective from objective. Clearly, the selfhood of the self is the object of that selfsame self's consciousness.
I assert there is a reasonably accurate one-size-fits-all-what-its-like-to-be-selfhood, accessible to many if not all sentients, that supports the sympathy and morals essential to the peaceable animal kingdom and civilization.
Well, true, but I still think calling it out serves a purpose. Im trying to get the point across that why it seems so obvious that only the physical can be real, is because of the way the problem has been set up in our culture. It is why when the question is asked what alternative is there? the expectation is that the answer must necessarily entail something spooky. Thats why the task is to show how we got here. And actually I think that is very much what Chalmers essay was about in the first place.
Splendid unicorn analogy, by the way. :up:
I won't develop the point here as we're drifting off-topic, but what's considered spooky for the physicalists are just the metaphysical assumptions that are not theirs, and there are at least a couple of big ones that are no less "spooky" than those of their major opponents.
Yes, I understood that was how you believed I was approaching this. But that doesn't answer how you are approaching this. If it is not a soul, what is it? How Is it different than just a descriptor of personal subjective experiences we all try to hash out with each other?
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm sure they're a great programmer, but not a great epistemologist. I've noted this in the past, but I'll repeat it again. Knowledge only exists expressed in some medium to be interpreted by something else. He's noting information as 'a Platonic form'. What is the form of Bach's first symphony? Does it exist out there as something ethereal, expressed in something other than matter or energy? Maybe it does, but it would have be expressed in that third unknown type of reality.
Otherwise Bach's first symphony can be expressed as information on paper, bits, pictures, and the instruments its played on. Every time its played, that is a unique expression and interpretation of the symphony. Our brain is matter and energy, so too are those concepts. Without a brain to think of them, they are gone.
I think the issue we have as people, and why this idea of the immaterial keeps coming back up, is because we shortcut a lot of concepts to be manageable in day to day life. We have a very active imagination, and are able to cut out the solid reality undergirding those concepts when we get excited at trying to apply them outside of our minds. We get excited at a concept that seems logical in our head, it excites us, and so we want to believe its real. This is great if it is then used as an impetus for exploration, careful application, and the willingness to amend it as tests come back with failures or unforeseen consequences. But if we start to elevate the concepts themselves of applicable testing, we fall into an illusion of holding something true, when it does not deserve it.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's simply because we don't program most machines to be this way. I think you're confusing the fact that we design machines, and we don't often design them with intrinsic agency and functional autonomy.
If we want to program something with limited internal agency, we can. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCmrMOzx5VA
We set AI to have goals, and to learn over repeated attempts. While the game is a simple example, we use it to teach machines as well.
Now you might think we're different, but we're really not by much. We have emotions and internal processes that drive us don't we? If you're hungry enough, you'll eat. Gotta pee? You find a way to do that. A child pees wherever until they learn just like a brand new AI that has basic functionality. And that's all a physical process. Noting that we have agency is not the same as demonstrating why that agency is separate from our physical brain.
Quoting Wayfarer
Its an identity distinction, and there is nothing in the application of this distinction that notes that our functional autonomy is not physical. Just because you can have the idea that its somehow separate, does not mean you've demonstrated that this idea works when applied. Can you show how human autonomy can exist apart from the brain? That's the real question here.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm asking the question, "What alternative is there?" and not expecting it to be spooky from you in particular. Your challenge is to demonstrate the existence of something that is not matter and energy. Saying, "I don't think matter and energy explains everything" is not enough.
A form of existence that is aware of itself.
Quoting Philosophim
Well, for a start that is not true, because we all know many things that are never expressed.
If you take a piece of information, be it a formula, a story, a recipe, or whatever, it can be translated between different media such as binary data, handwritten, engraved in brass and so on. The information remains the same while the material form is completely different. So the information is not material.
Quoting Philosophim
Nothing that can be described only in terms of physics exhibits those atttributes. Taking all of the known laws of physics, there is no way you could arrive at a functional description of an organism.
Quoting Philosophim
Your arguments, tendentious though they may be.
You really do believe information exists outside a physical form?
A piece of information?
A non-physical that exists with no physically supporting mechanism?
And all the various media have interactions with brains as a common denominator. The 'piece of information' doesn't move supernaturally from media to media but brains always guide the process.
It really is a chain of physical events in all cases of information transfer.
A printed page is just physical pattern.
Brains are involved encoding and decoding.
Just identify brains as supporting non-physical content in the process and things work fine with no mystery elements like unsupported "information".
Information and consciousness are both physically Instantiated non-physicals. It's the only possibility. Seems like a common theme with overlap between information as it exists and consciousness.
Mostly a problem of definitions, boundaries and semantics at the fundamental level.....
No kidding. But the judgement that is involved in making that argument is not physical. If you want to arrive at any understanding of what 'physical' actually means, you need to exercise judgement - if this, then that; this must mean that; and so on. None of that is part of the curriculum or subject matter of physics as such. If you want to look for how brains encode those simple logical steps in neurophysiological terms, well, good luck with that. Because you'll already be using the very faculty that you're wanting to explain.
Alright.
I might tend to physicalism, but if you are saying our mental worlds are what drives thing... I do agree.
Thank you, this is a good answer. That's a theory, which is fine. If the brain is aware of itself, and the brain is matter and energy, then matter and energy in the right circumstances can be aware of itself. How is this inadequate? Is there evidence of some existence that is not matter and energy that is aware of itself that we know of?
Quoting Wayfarer
You conceive of an identity that ties commonalities between these physical things together, while removing the physical aspects of them. The idea of an abstraction does not entail an actual abstraction that exists apart from matter and energy. Again, if you could show how information can exist apart from any matter or energy, try to do so.
What you're doing is saying, "I can think of information as if its not tied to any physical medium, therefore information can exist not tied to any physical medium." Just like I can think of a unicorn that cannot be sensed or detected through its magic, but cannot prove such a thing exists. Please don't take this as belittling, I'm simply trying to give a clear example of the issue here. It is a very common mistake for us to assume because we can come up with a concept that seems logical and has nothing outright contradicting it in our head, that it is a viable reality outside of our head.
So again, I can have an idea of Bach's first symphony, and we are going with the idea that ideas are matter and energy in the brain. I can have it expressed as notes on a page. I can have it expressed by the playing of a tuba. How does the information of Bach's first symphony exists apart from matter and energy? Can you point to it? How is this not a Platonic form with all the logical problems that it brings?
Quoting Wayfarer
Alright, then try to counter these points, because these points note that our autonomy is physical.
1. Drugs that affect mood and decisions. A person getting cured of schizophrenia by medication for example.
2. The removal of the brain or physical processes that result in life from the brain, and the inability of autonomy to persist.
3. Brain damage resulting in differing behaviors and consciousness. For example:
"In split-brain patients, the corpus callosum has been surgically cut to alleviate intractable, severe epilepsy. One of the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries in neuroscience is that severing the corpus callosum leads to a curious phenomenon (Fig. 1): when an object is presented in the right visual field, the patient responds correctly verbally and with his/her right hand. However, when an object is presented in the left visual field the patient verbally states that he/she saw nothing, and identifies the object accurately with the left hand only (Gazzaniga et al., 1962; Gazzaniga, 1967; Sperry, 1968, 1984; Wolman, 2012). This is concordant with the human anatomy; the right hemisphere receives visual input from the left visual field and controls the left hand, and vice versa (Penfield and Boldrey, 1937; Cowey, 1979; Sakata and Taira, 1994). Moreover, the left hemisphere is generally the site of language processing (Ojemann et al., 1989; Cantalupo and Hopkins, 2001; Vigneau et al., 2006). Thus, severing the corpus callosum seems to cause each hemisphere to gain its own consciousness "
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/5/1231/2951052
Quoting Wayfarer
This is not biased, nor even really my argument. If you're going to claim that something exists which is not physical, it is normal to point out any evidence for what it is, and/or why the claim that "X is physical" is unreasonable.
That is because we are different people. Ucarr, I feel very little similarity in myself to other people. I know objectively that I am. But my feelings are worthless. I do not feel what some call "connections" with other people. If I listened to my feelings I would be a lone hermit, and perfectly content to do so. Fortunately, I understand that actions and consequences are far more important than feelings in life.
I am not trying to discount the fact that some aspects of consciousness can be similar. I'm just noting that similarity is not necessary for morality.
Quoting ucarr
This is a nice thought, but can we demonstrate this to be something known, or will it only remain a belief?
Because you could never arrive at an understanding of it through physics and chemistry, which is the analysis of matter and enegy. You do understand that all you're arguing for - in fact, pretty well all you ever argue for - is what is called 'physicalist reductionism', don't you? Physicalist reductionism is the view that everything that exists, including complex phenomena like consciousness and life, can ultimately be explained in terms of physical entities, such as matter and energy, and their interactions. It holds that all higher-level properties (such as mental states or biological functions) are reducible to, and can be fully understood by, the underlying physical processes described by the laws of physics and chemistry. In this framework, there is no need to posit non-physical substances or properties. That's basically your view, and you can stick with it, I'm done with debating it.
Isn't the physics of a note an air vibration against a metal Tuba? Have we not made Bach's first symphony over the radio, which is essentially a physical radio wave that interacts with a radio, vibrations, and can be calculated through physics? This broad claim is not good enough Wayfarer, and doesn't actually answer the question. Not answering the question is the same as saying, "No". You need to demonstrate why example's I've given of matter and energy being aware of itself are false. I gave you three to tackle. If you choose not to tackle them, that's your call. But I have been more than fair in presenting what would be needed to help your point gain footing.
Quoting Wayfarer
It doesn't matter what its called. I just care about the logic. And we're not really talking about my viewpoints, but yours. I'm asking you to present evidence for your viewpoints that makes them a viable logical alternative to explore then what is commonly known today. If you cannot, then it is your viewpoints, not mine, that are circumspect.
Quoting Wayfarer
If there is no need to posit non-physical substances or properties, and this is a sound and logical position to hold, why should anyone hold anything else? I'm not married to it, but you're not presenting anything that shakes its foundations. If you're done, that's fine. But if you want to give it another stab, feel free.
This seems like a misunderstanding. Quantum phenomena have discernible, even measurable effects. That is what qualifies them as 'physical'. The seeming spookiness arises when we seek to apply macro physical concepts to micro phenomena.
Quoting Philosophim
As far as I know Bach composed no symphonies. Concertos yes.
Quoting Philosophim
When arguments fail tendentious categorization sets in. :roll:
I would agree with ucarr that the basic sense of self is plausibly thought to be the same across species. Obviously this is not an empirically checkable assertion. It seems that almost nothing in philosophy is.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Philosophim
Quoting Philosophim
It is known by you what it's like to be a person.
It is known that the transitive property can be configured with word arrangements that make valid statements: If a = b and c = b, then a = c. I can take this word arrangement and apply it to you: If Philosophim = person and Joe Blow = person, then Philosophim = Joe Blow (to the extent of the standard of measurement known as person).
Quoting Philosophim
Two persons understand each other to a limited degree because they share important attributes common to personhood.
We share our stories because the bond of human identity allows us to walk a mile in each others' shoes. How much we relate to another person varies widely, but the connection rarely drops to zero.
Quoting Philosophim
Is factually incorrect. Chalmers argument is directed at the inadequacy of physical accounts to accurately capture first-person experience, yours or anyone elses. You may not accept it, but it is what the hard problem argument says, so your paraphrase of it is incorrect.
Against better judgement, I will tackle some of these arguments.
Firstly, your response begs the question of whether and in what sense physical matter is conscious, or alternatively whether conscious beings are physical. You're assuming that a self-aware being can (1) be reduced to 'a brain', and (2) comprises only matter and energy. But whether these are true are the very things that need to be explained, hence, begging the question.
As for the brain being aware of itself, that is another contested claim. Brains themselves aren't aware of anything unless they're embodied in a conscious being. Certainly conscious self-aware beings have brains (although there are some strange anomalies) but saying that 'brains are aware' is described in The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience as 'the mereological fallacy', that is, attributing to an anatomical part something that can only be rightly attributed to the whole being.
As to ' physics of a note an air vibration against a metal Tuba?', why only tubas, of all the instruments in the world? And so what? What does that prove? The fact that Bachs music is transmitted through the radio also has precisely zero bearing. Yes, sound waves are physical, but your hearing of the music as music is not physical, for reasons outlined in Facing Up to the Probem of Consciousness, which you don't recognize.
Quoting Philosophim
And I have answered them.
FTR, Bach did not write any symphonies.
I wouldn't say its plausible that the sense of self is the same across species. Even among humans, its known that people have different sense of selves. Did you know that some people cannot mentally visualize? When they close their eyes, all that's there is darkness. That would clearly be a different sense of self then someone who visualizes. Now compare that to a dog, a lizard, and a house fly who have different dna and brain compositions. I'm not saying they don't have a sense of self, but I don't think its plausible that they are the same.
I would argue as well that poor philosophy is that which cannot be verified, or has no pathways to verify it. Good philosophy does, and eventually becomes part of science or is incorporated into culture.
Quoting Janus
Ha ha! I only used Bach because I didn't want to type a longer name. :D Thanks, I'll stop using that example.
Quoting Patterner
See above.
Its a nice attitude Ucarr. Nothing wrong with holding that. :)
Cool. At least we got one thing settled. :rofl:
Didn't you and I already address this on your first response to me? My point was that the heart of why this was is because we cannot know what its like to be another subjective individual. However, I'm not sure I tackled why I say 'other'. Neurolink is a physical account of a first person experience to the person experiencing the link. Otherwise it wouldn't function. It it by the conscious willing of the individual that the link work. When they have a particular feeling, they can trigger the link. So we have a physical account and a subjective account. However, no one else can know what that feeling is like, only the person feeling it.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't understand why you feel this way. If you're going to argue your position convincingly to someone else, you need to be open to tackling them. Even if we disagree, the result of thinking about them may produce something else down the road for both of us.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not quite, but I might need to be more explicit about this. What I'm noting is that the standard model of science posits that the brain is the source of human consciousness, at least in terms of behavior. What I'm asking you is this, "What does this model fail to explain?" besides being able to objectively model personal subjective experience? Second, "What alternative can you present that explains it better, and has evidence of existing?"
Quoting Wayfarer
I think we're cutting hairs in context here. My point is that consciousness comes from the brain, and the brain is composed of matter and energy. Therefore consciousness is a property of a physical object. Short hand for this I'm using the phrase, "Brains are aware", but if that phrase bothers you, the sentences above are the intention. Also, you'll have to explain this sentence to me a little more: "Brains themselves aren't aware of anything unless they're embodied in a conscious being." This is 'begging the question'. What is a conscious being that is not a brain? How does a brain embody a conscious being?
What I do note is that we cannot know what its like to BE that consciousness, therefore we cannot objectively measure what its like to have a subjective experience as that physical matter. Which to me, opens up the question of how much matter and energy in the universe is conscious. Since we cannot know what its like to be other matter, and we only determine consciousness objectively by behavior, are there things we think aren't 'behavior', but are? But i digress and I hope you see the argument.
Quoting Wayfarer
To put a little levity in the conversation I hope. :) Pick any instrument of course.
Quoting Wayfarer
That would be 'interpretation of information'. Are you saying that if no one is around to hear the radio waves play, the information doesn't exist? The radio was the mechanical interpretation of the waves into the vibration of sound, showing a complete physical process of information, transmission, and interpretation. You seem to think that information can only matter if a human is involved. But if information can exist apart from matter and energy, how can this be?
Quoting Wayfarer
Some of them. You didn't answer my 3 points, which I was referring to here.
Quoting Philosophim
Quoting PhilosophimThese things change various aspects of how the brain works, and, therefore, what we subjectively experience. They don't address how it is that we subjectively experience them at all. That's the HPoC.
And I'll note again, the only reason we cannot figure out how physical processes give rise to the subjective experiences of the mind is because we have no way of objectively knowing what it is to hold that subjective experience, because you must BE that being having that subjective experience.
It is NOT that we don't understand that the brain causes subjective experiences. We know portions of the brain that affect the different interpretation of sensations we have. We can stimulate areas of the brain and a person can say, "When you do that, I imagine a dog." What we cannot do is know what they are experiencing directly when they say, "I imagine a dog". When a patient takes a particular type of medication, they feel woozy. This is an objective fact. Do we know what its like for the patient to have the subjective experience they have when they say, "I feel woozy?" No. So we can never objectively note what 'woozy' is as a subjective experience, only an observed behavior. That's the crux of the hard problem.
Quoting Patterner
No, that's the easy problem.
"For Chalmers, the easy problem is making progress in explaining cognitive functions and discovering how they arise from physical processes in the brain. The hard problem is accounting for why these functions are accompanied by conscious experience."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43853850#:~:text=For%20Chalmers%2C%20the%20easy%20problem,are%20accompanied%20by%20conscious%20experience.
And why is it hard to find why these functions are accompanied by conscious experience? Because we cannot know what it is like to BE that other conscious experience. Consciousness as a behavior is simple to observe. Consciousness as a subjective experience can only be known by being that subjective experience.
So when we give a drug that treats schizophrenia, we know that it works by behavior. We don't know what its like to be that person having schizophrenia, or what they are feeling as a subjective experience when they take the medicine. That's it.
It is not in any way an implication that the brain is not the source of consciousness. It does not in any way negate the behavior based approach to consciuosness and mental health that has worked for decades. It does not negate the fact that the brain causes your subjective experiences. Its just noting that because we can never know what its like for another being to experience their own subjective experience, we cannot objectively match brain state "X, Y, Z" and say, "Whenever X, Y, Z is matched, all people will experience the exact same subjective sensation of wooziness." We might see they all have the same behavior, but we can never objectively know what each individuals subjective experience of 'woozy' is.
Solid criticism. I should have reined myself in and been more precise and nuanced there.
(I may reformulate the point in my new thread rather than here or I may leave it for now. Not sure yet.)
Quoting Patterner
Quoting Philosophim
Quoting J
Quoting Philosophim
I think your point above makes an important clarification: there's something about the native point of view of the sentient that obstructs, so far, our understanding how (or if) physical processes give rise to the subjective experience.
Quoting Philosophim
As I understand you, you're implying that the subjectivity of the sentient is insuperable i.e., it is a container which has no exit. This claim, if true, leads us into the very complicated business of examining the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity.
If its true that the subjectivity of the sentient is insuperable, that then calls into question the possibility of objectivity in general. If the sentient cannot know what its like to be beyond its own subjective being, then it follows that the sentient cannot know what its like for anything, other than itself, to be, whether a stone, a galaxy or another person.
Well, if objectivity in general is in doubt, then, as you all know, that lands us right back into the territory of solipsism: how can I be sure what I perceive is existentially independent of my perception of it? Indeed, how can I have such knowledge if Im forever locked inside of my subjectivity?
So, we now see that the HPoC is another angle of view a very complex and perhaps ultimately fruitful angle of view focusing on the gnarly problem of the possibly inescapable self-enclosure of solipsism.
It sounds strange, but, in my context here, when we claim to know the chemical composition/interactions of a rock, were also claiming to know what its like to be that rock.
To be sure, knowing a rock by knowing its chemical composition/interactions is a much more simple phenomenon than knowing another person by knowing their consciousness, but the difference is a difference of degree, not a categorical difference.
If were locked out of objectivity because of insuperable subjectivity, then were thrown all the way back to securing our beliefs on the basis of faith rather than on the basis of science.
Existence precedes essence because science can only get started by assuming the existence of things prior to any possibility of analysis and its attendant logic and the subsequent scientific disciplines.
Existentialism, which is centered on existence precedes essence, gives us a way forward with our database of scientific disciplines and their methodologies. We, as existentialists, can assert that we dont really know the world beyond realistic-seeming narratives that, ultimately, in the absence of epistemological certainty, we hold as true on the basis of faith. Going forward from there, we try our best to have integrity as we hold faithful to our realistic-seeming narratives.
Quoting PhilosophimI am the being having the subjective experience. That does not help me understand how it is achieved.
Quoting PhilosophimThat quote explains it nicely. But you are misinterpreting it. Let me try this approach. This is from [I]Darwin's Black Box[/I], by Michael Behe. (Think what you want of his overall conclusions regarding a designer. But her knows the science.).
[I]That[/I] is the Easy Problem. That is how we perceive a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. There is TONS more detail in this, and we could go much further, mapping out how we can differentiated different frequencies within that portion of the spectrum. And how our perceptions are stored in the brain, and how that stored information can then be compared to future perceptions of that portion of the spectrum. And how we report on our perceptions.
All of that is the Easy Problem. Not "easy" as in "a piece of cake." But easy as in we understand how to go about it.
We do not know how to go about the HP. That's why it's named the Hard. Because we don't know. How is all of that subjectively experienced? People like Tse, Damasio, and Gazzaniga begin their books by saying we do not know. Koch just paid off his 25 year bet to Chalmers because we haven't figured it out. Physicist Brian Greene says there are no known properties of matter that even hint at such a thing. Why do I see red, rather than just perceive different frequencies, the way a robot with an electric eye might? Why do I feel pain, rather than just perceive damage to my body, the way a robot that's wrapped in a sensory web might? These things can, and do, take place without any subjective experience. How is the subjective experience accomplished in us?
Quoting Baden
Skalidris seems to be saying that consciousness, in the form of subjectivity, holds insuperable. If so, then no objective perception of consciousness is possible, and thus the insoluble problem for developing technology that generates subjectivity.
The undecidability of the question of an advanced cyborg having an innate unique selfhood as distinguished from a technology-based simulation of same might be insoluble.
I think AI will go forward to a technology-based simulation of selfhood. Can it somehow deviate from its programming into a unique sentience not programmed? In other words, can programming propagate an emergent and unique selfhood?
Moving towards Bladerunner 2049, can a technology-based emergent selfhood propagate another emergent selfhood in the mode of giving birth to a child?
Quoting ucarr
Quoting ucarr
So, I predict that technology-based sentience will, per the above speculations, eventually spawn unique sentience not programmed which, in turn, will spawn emergent selfhood in the mode of giving birth to a child.
This tells us that the insuperabillty of subjectivity of selfhood will be preserved across objective propagation of selfhood. So, the seeming-immateriality of selfhood, preserved as technology-based selfhood, will persist, and organic humans will not be any more certain about what it's like to be an independently conscious cyborg than they are certain about what it's like to be another organic human.
There will be difficulties in the organic human_independent cyborg relationships, but these difficulties will, to some extent, parallel the human-to-human relationship problems.
Yes, that's correct.
Quoting ucarr
Also correct.
Quoting ucarr
Because we go by behavior. Lets say I eat a poison apple and get sick. My eyes glaze over, my pulse races, and I start to sweat remnants of the poison. That's a physical reality that does not depend on how the personal is personally experiencing the sensations of being poisoned.
Quoting ucarr
Its not strange at all. We objectively do not know what its like to be that rock. What we do is look at the measurable existence of the rock and 'its behavior'. Since we do not ascribe anything the rock 'does' to an internal locus, we say it doesn't behave like its conscious. But do we objectively know it does not have a subjective experience? No. We simply assume.
Quoting ucarr
The difference is that a human has different behaviors that we ascribe to being conscious. But we cannot objectively know what its like for that other human to have the subjective experience of being themself.
Quoting ucarr
We are locked out of objectivity in determining the subjective experience of any existence. It is faith that you and I share a similar consciousness. We can note that our behavior may be different, but that doesn't mean our subjective experience during that behavior is different or the same. For example, we could both see the color green, but I subjectively experience it differently then you. Indeed, some people are color blind. This means their subjective experience of green is so similar to another set of colors, that they can't really tell much of a difference. But can a color sighted person every objectively know what that's like? No.
Quoting ucarr
This seems to hold on a surface level. Great points Ucarr!
Quoting Philosophim
If we use the Turing_Chalmers' argument to the effect: a cyborg externally programmed to behave like a conscious human will appear to be conscious i.e., have a selfhood without that actually being the case, then we cannot be certain that an observed person is really internally conscious i.e., in possession of a selfhood.
Let me reverse engineer my argument above to apply to what you also said:
Quoting Philosophim
As you say, re: the rock's possible subjective experience, we simply assume not. So, possibly (but unlikely) the rock could be suppressing it's selfhood from expressing as behavior so as to keep its selfhood hidden from observers.
This is why I claim that my selfhood and your selfhood, though non-identical, approximate each other sufficiently generically so that it's correct to say the difference between the two is by degree instead of categorical. For this reason, then, you and I do know, to some practical degree, what it's like to be the other person.
Sentient beings cannot navigate the natural world of other sentients without knowing to a practical degree what it's like to be another sentient. Of course there are many problems in our efforts to understand each other. For this reason, books both fictional and non-fictional are written in numbers counting up into the millions.
Quoting Philosophim
I've underlined the part of your above quote wherein you describe what it's like to be a color blind person without being one yourself. How is it that you can do that? You have enough information, both from science and from descriptions given by color blind persons to approximate in your understanding what the experience of color blindness is like. There is presumably some degree of separation between what the actually color blind person experiences subjectively, and your cognitive simulation of that experience but, again, I claim the difference is by a navigable degree, not by an impenetrable categorical difference.
We're really not that far off from one another. Please don't take my disagreement as hostile. :) The reason why we don't know how is because we cannot currently know what its like to be the thing having the subjective experience. If we could, the hard problem would be solved.
Quoting Patterner
Actually, you could determine how you experience. If you were in brain surgery and a doctor stimulated a region of your brain in the same way and you experienced a sensation every time, you would know how to create the sensation by stimulation your brain. In a less sense, we do this with drugs like alcohol, caffiene, or pain killers. You are the only one who knows what it feels like however. We can't take, "the state of Patterner's subjective experience," and say, "Any time a person drinks alcohol, they will have the same subjective experience of being tipsy as Patterner does."
Quoting Patterner
Right. We're along the same lines here again. This is because we can't know what its like objectively for something else to experience being them. That's all there is to it.
Quoting Patterner
The problem is we're looking at matter and energy externally for behavior. Since we cannot look internally to see what the experience of being that thing is like, we're stuck for now. Do we know how a robot with an electric eye experiences processing? We don't. We can observe behaviors, break it down into its bytes and bits, but when the entire process is running, when the code is flying by at millions of bytes per second, processes being monitored and checked...what is the experience like? We don't know. We currently can't know.
Quoting Patterner
Incorrect. We don't know. Just like I don't know if you have a subjective experience that is like mine at all. We do not know if a robot or a program doesn't have a subjective experience. It doesn't behave like a consciousness, but it doesn't mean there isn't a subjective experience. What is it like to be a bacteria? It responds, eats, and divides. What is it like to the be cells in my hands? The blood in my veins? All of these are living things. Do they have a subjective experience of being? We can't tell, because we can't BE the thing we're looking at.
What we don't know if whether the robot actually has a subjective experience of being a robot. Its does not have to be the consciousness of a human to have a subjective experience. A dog likely has a subjective experience because of its behavior, but we still don't know what its like to BE a dog.
To quote Patterner:
Quoting Patterner
Quoting ucarr
Its not unnavigatable, its just not objective. We take these conclusions through behaviors, approximations, and logical applications. I can imagine what it is like to be confused about something I see. So I take that feeling, and combine it with colors. Then I imagine two colors, and both are grey. Now I have an approximate understanding of what its like to be color blind, but I still don't have the objective 'subjective experience' of an actual color blind person.
Its like describing an apple to someone. You could probably make a pretty good approximation through descriptions based on what people know that aren't apples. But you wouldn't actually know what an apple was like until you saw it front of you. Until you tasted it yourself.
Quoting Philosophim
Of course the human sense of self is elaborate. I was referring to the basic sense of self which consists in the sense of being distinct from everything else. It is arguable that this sense comes with being embodied with the interoceptive and proprioceptive senses that both animals and humans presumably enjoy.
What is generally considered good philosophy I think would be that which seems most plausible to the most people in light of the whole more or less coherent picture of the world and our place in it which reigns at any historical period. It seems likely there will never be complete consensus but there may be majority consensus.
As I see it is not a matter of empirical confirmation that distinguishes good from bad philosophy, but rather what is considered to be good philosophy is that which seems to cohere best with the interpretive picture we have built up from those things which can be empirically confirmed.
Quoting Patterner
How would those different frequencies be "perceived" if not in the form of different colours?
Quoting Patterner
This is an intriguing conjectured phenomenon. One question raised by it that comes to mind is whether or not subjective experience counts as behavior. Usually, when a sentient experiences something, even if it's just observation, that subjective experience triggers physiological reactions that, by definition, are detectable. For example, if a sentient observers the approach of a powerful predator, typical physiological reactions include, acceleration of heartbeat and temperature, dilation of the pupils, and other symptoms of fear and stress. We don't suppose rocks can have such physiological reactions, but as soon as we imaginatively ascribe subjectivity to a rock, assumptions about fight or flight strategies for sake of survival enter the picture.
If the rock is conscious, but we don't know it, then the rock is far from being exactly what we think it is.
Our current turn in the conversation is promising along the lines of further examining the relationship between subjective/objective.
Quoting Philosophim
Right. Our necessarily subjective examination of the robot, like our examination of everything else, terminates in a simulation based upon what we perceive concerning its nature and behavior. Ultimately, we're compelled to put faith in the serviceable accuracy of our simulations of the agents populating the world around us.
It must be the case that our objectivity is populated by these simulations.
If a simulation necessarily differs to some degree from its referent, then we can understand that the interface linking self with other is a complicated amalgam of the two. One generalization derivable is that no sentient is totally isolated because even the sentient's own selfhood can be simulated asymmetrically, as evidenced by multiple personality disorder.
And you need to be open to hearing your interlocutor, and I don't believe that you've been doing that.
Quoting Philosophim
Again, that is not the point of David Chalmer's essay, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. I'm taking issue with your paraphrase of his argument. If you want to argue that this is what he should say, feel free. But it's not what he does say.
Quoting Philosophim
Again, it's not what he says. He says that there is no satisfactory theoretical account of ANY conscious experience, not just of other people's or of animals. I've said this a number of times, and then you straight away repeat your incorrect interpretation of his argument. You can take issue with his argument, but that's different to misrepresenting it. That's what I mean by 'not hearing'.
Quoting Philosophim
I think by 'autonomy', you mean 'anatomy'.
Certainly, physical influences can affect cognitiontheres no disputing that. Drugs can alter mood and behavior, and brain damage can lead to significant changes in consciousness and personality. But this doesn't demonstrate that consciousness is entirely a product of brain activity. Its important to recognize that causation can work in both directions. Neuroplasticitythe brains ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connectionsshows that consciously undertaken actions and thoughts can have real, measurable effects on the brains structure and function. This is an example of top-down causation, where mental processes, such as attention, intention, and practice, influence neurophysiological changes, distinct from the bottom-up causation that is implied by physicalism. Your proposed schema is all 'bottom-up'.
Furthermore, the analogy of the brain as a receiver rather than just the generator of consciousness provides a different way to look at this issue. Just as a radio receives and tunes into waves without generating them, the brain may play a focusing or filtering role, modulating and organizing conscious experience but not wholly creating it. This view contrasts with the dominant idea that the brain produces consciousness in the same way that a factory produces a product. Instead, the brain might serve as a critical instrument through which consciousness manifests and interacts with the physical world. The fact that consciousness can change the brain's configuration through neuroplasticity suggests a dynamic interplay, rather than a one-way causal relationship between the brain and the mind. Besides, the origin of consciousness is arguably coterminous with the origin of life itself, and nobody really knows how that got started.
I don't know if the split-brain research is really relevant to that. In any case, it is discussed in Chapter 1 of Donald Hoffman's book Case Against Reality. He's a cognitive scientist, with a rather radical philosophical view, which I won't try and explain here. But after reviewing the split-brain experimental data, he concludes:
[quote=Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality, Pp 18-19]We have no scientific theories that explain how brain activityor computer activity, or any other kind of physical activitycould cause, or be, or somehow give rise to, conscious experience. We dont have even one idea thats remotely plausible. If we consider not just brain activity, but also the complex interactions among brains, bodies, and the environment, we still strike out. Were stuck. Our utter failure leads some to call this the hard problem of consciousness, or simply a mystery. ...
What do we want in a scientific theory of consciousness? Consider the case of tasting basil versus hearing a siren. For a theory that proposes that brain activity causes conscious experiences, we want mathematical laws or principles that state precisely which brain activities cause the conscious experience of tasting basil, precisely why this activity does not cause the experience of, say, hearing a siren, and precisely how this activity must change to transform the experience from tasting basil to, say, tasting rosemary. These laws or principles must apply across species, or else explain precisely why different species require different laws. No such laws, indeed no plausible ideas, have ever been proposed.[/quote]
Quoting Philosophim
Information doesn't exist in the same way that matter and energy doit isn't a physical substance or force. Instead, information exists in the relationships between entities, and its significance depends on interpretation. Think of a book: where exactly is the information in that book? The ink on the page is simply matter, but the information arises only when a reader interprets it, and only if they understand the language or code its written in. The book itself is not one thing and its meaning another; rather, the meaning emerges through the interaction between the symbols on the page and a mind capable of understanding them.
Information, in this sense, is relational. It depends on the patterns or structures that carry meaning and on the existence of an interpreter. This makes information fundamentally different from matter and energyits not a physical object but something that manifests through relationships and interpretation. I think this is what Norbert Weiner meant when he said 'information is information, not matter or energy'. And no, not just because he was a poor epistemologist.
Quoting Philosophim
I think, actually, that you will find that a very difficult claim to support. You assume that this is what science posits, but there's some important background you're missing here.
At the beginning of modern science, proper, 'consciousness' in the first person sense was excluded from the objects of consideration. Proper objects were those which could be defined and analysed in terms of the primary attributes of determinate figure, size, position, motion/rest, and number etc. Qualities such as colour, taste, smell, etc, were deemed secondary or subjective.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36]Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.[/quote]
Now, when you say 'the standard model of science', I think this is what you mean. And within that model the only 'real objects' are, well, objects. If 'mind' or 'consciousness' can be said to exist, then it can only be as a product of those objects. That's why you're incredulous at the denial of a causal relationship between brain and mind - to you, it's just 'the way things are'. But I'm afraid it doesn't hold up to philosophical scrutiny.
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I don't know nearly enough of how our visual system works. My Behe quote stops with a current being transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. I don't know what happens there. But nothing red or blue happens.
When you talk about how we perceive are you talking about our conscious awareness of our colour perceptions or simply our unconscious responses which arguably go on most of the time? Of course I won't argue that non-biological machines can be consciously aware of their detections of colour differences.
The HPoC is why the unconscious responses are accompanied by the conscious awareness, rather than going on "in the dark." They can go on in the dark, as they do in the non-biological machines we've made that can perceive and differentiate different frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, and act in different ways in response to different frequencies. The physical processes that take place within us don't suggest conscious awareness. The physical properties of particles (mass, charge, spinn, etc.) don't suggest conscious awareness. So why the redness of red, or the sweetness of sugar? Why subjective experience at all?
Physical processes don't suggest conscious awareness, unless you mean behavior. The physical processes that don't suggest awareness don't suggest the absence of conscious awareness either. Nor do they suggest that awareness could not arise from physical processes.
You ask why subjective awareness at all. Presuming it is a real thing then why not? We have a subjective prejudice that physical stuff could not have subjective experience. Exactly what would be the argument supporting that conclusion? We have nothing to compare our situation with so it remains just an assumption based on intuitive feelings I think.
Quoting JanusI did see something red. And I don't need post hoc reflection on such an experience. I can look at something red right now, and reflect on the experience as I'm having it.
Quoting JanusYou are right about all that. But here's how I see it. I've used this analogy before.
If I saw a skyscraper made entirely of liquid H2O, I'd be awfully suspicious. To my knowledge, the properties of liquid H2O cannot explain a skyscraper. Do those properties suggest the absence/impossibility of skyscrapers? I suppose not. But I'm still thinking it's suspicious.
Of course, we should look into the properties of H2O. It seems to be the only thing we have to work with, after all. Maybe we just aren't aware of all its properties. Maybe we haven't yet thought of all the ways the properties we're aware of can be combined.
But we try and try, and can't find anything to explain it. We don't even have a theory for how it can be. We just keep assuming it must be nothing but liquid H2O, since we can't find anything else involved. So we assume if we gather enough water, we'll eventually see how it makes skyscrapers.
I think the case for consciousness is even more difficult to explain. At least H2O and skyscrapers both have physical properties, and no suggestion of non-physical properties. Even processes like flight, metabolism, and vision can be seen to come from purely physical foundations. Subjective experience cannot. The properties of matter that we know of, and have measured to an amazing degree, do not suggest subjective experience.
The argument for reductionism I hear most often is, just because we haven't figured it out with our sciences yet, doesn't mean we won't. My opinion is the fact that we haven't should not be considered evidence that we will. Nor is there evidence that the things we are aware of because of our sciences are the only things that exist. The different nature of subjective experience, on the other hand, suggests something different is involved.
Quoting Patterner
All members of the animal kingdom make audible utterances in response to what they're experiencing. As cognitive capacity increases going upward along the food chain, the audible utterances in response to cognitive experiences become more complicated.
Audible utterances for a specific type of experience are repeated as that type of experience repeats. The mind of the creature takes memory impressions of a specific type of experience matched to a specific type of utterance.
At the human level, this same general process of memorization of audible utterance patterns matched to corresponding experiences generates words and sentences shared by members of the group experiencing these audible utterance_experience duets.. Language.
Human language is merely the more intricately detailed deluxe version of sound patterns matched to experiences practiced by the entire vocal subset of the animal kingdom.
Language, like human thought, is material_physical. The continuum running from the current_voltage variations of neuronal circuits to the vibrating vocal chords of utterance to the receptive hearing of listeners followed by their own symmetrical mirroring of same within themselves is material_physical.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Patterner
There is the question whether experience of direct sensory input is incomprehensible_inexpressible stimulation_perturbation of a material_physical state, with this brute force registration of a now altered state -- perhaps somewhat parallel to an electron hit by a photon and then elevated to a higher orbital shell in its now excited state -- causing a memory circularity that is the reflection Janus refers to above.
So, by this continuity, consciousness is rooted in circularity_redundancy and, like Wayfarer's point about the meaning of a printed book being inter-relational -- as in the waveform of mass, i.e., energy as distinguished from the particle form of mass, i.e., matter -- does not possess a discretely resolved position and direction; consciousness, like in the reading of a book, does not have a discrete vector measurement possible, and so it appears as if pre-QM science cannot measure consciousness.
QM, however, can and does measure the probability clouds of energetically perturbed elementary particles. Also, the whereness of vector-measurable phenomena is addressed as waveform-like probability graphs in a theater of action that allows existential ambiguities of the physical_material. It's math that currently makes the closest approach to the physical_material status of consciousness.
We must continue to mine math's ability to measure things we can't imagine experientially.
Neurons have 100 trillion atoms so I don't see the mechanism of consciousness at the atomic or quantum level at all.
...just neurons operating at the scale of neurons seems to be the right scale of consciousness.
And consciousness has a non-physical component.
If you recall what you were doing ten years ago that is part of your personal consciousness.
The physical reality of ten years ago doesn't exist.
It's just a memory. Non-physical information.
I think most of us would classify a memory as both information and a component of consciousness.
Chalmers didn't do anyone any favors in setting up the hard problem.
I just disregard him.
As I've noted before, I'm not quoting Chalmers. I appreciate the point out to Chalmer's words, but I'm simply noting the underlying support and reason for the hard problem. Think of it this way. Lets say that we could examine a brain, and objectively know exactly what it feels like when that brain functions in a particular way. The hard problem would disappear. But as long as we can never objectively know what its like to have the subjective experience of another being, the hard problem stays.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, I'm not quoting Chalmers. As to what he's talking about, its not behavior. Its the fact that we cannot experience the subjective experience of another being. We are not in disagreement on this.
Quoting Wayfarer
True, but do we have evidence of something independent of the brain in regards to consciousness?
Quoting Wayfarer
The fallacy here is the assumption that consciousness is independent of the brain. If it is not, and simply a result of the brains functions, it is the brain affecting the brain. While an interesting avenue to look into something independent of the brain, we need evidence of that something for this to be a viable point.
Quoting Wayfarer
My proposal doesn't use top or bottom. I simply believe that physical matter and energy can have subjective experiences. It is a property of matter like, dry, wet, sandy, etc. It is what it is 'to be'. To what point? I don't know. That's the hard problem. We can't know what its like for a skin cell to be that skin cell. At what point does a clump of brain cells have a subjective experience? Is the subjective experience of being drunk the same across every individual? We can't objectively know.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure. I have no problem with this idea. But do we have evidence that the brain is only a receiver? We do have evidence in regards to how the senses are processed. So in that regard, it is. But as for consciousness, where does the brain receive this? How? Is there some type of measurement we can find that shows there is something independent of the brain affecting the brain? For that, we don't. So while its a nice idea to explore, the lack of evidence leads this to a dead end.
Correct, and I am not disagreeing with this. What he is not saying is, "Consciousness is not physical." What he's really asking implicitly is, "Why is consciousness physical?" Why can something physical have a subjective experience? To me, its like asking why water is wet. Why does a rock exist at all? Why is there something instead of nothing? It is the mystery of being.
Again, nothing that I've said contradicts this. At the crux of it all, why is this? Because we cannot objectively determine what its like to have the subjective experience of tasting basil. I can know what its like for me, and you can know what its like for you. But we can't objectively know what its like for the other person.
Quoting Wayfarer
And yet wasn't there a relationship between the radio waves, the radio, and then the sound played? Isn't an interpretation a physical response to stimulus or an event?
Quoting Wayfarer
Your book example is spot on. And I can agree that we can have an interpretation of information as both a medium which exists, and the interplay between that medium and an interpreter. What hasn't been shown is the noun or the interpretation of information that isn't through some physical medium. Can you think of one?
Quoting Wayfarer
What are thing things in relationship, and what is doing the interpreting? What is easier to state with what we know, is that matter and energy can hold particular states (information as noun) and can have reactions when that state collides with another state which we call an interpreter (information as relation). What is wrong with saying that this is an aspect of the physical world, when we have evidence of a radio interpreting waves?
Quoting Wayfarer
I want to be clear again, I am noting that science can measure consciousness as behavior, and agree 100% with you that it cannot currently objectively know the first person sense of it. As for behavior, the entirety of neuroscience, pharmacology, and psychiatry operates and functions as if consciousness as a behavior is an objective result of the mind. Without this, the entirety of modern medicine would not work.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't believe its a product of these objects. I believe it is the experience of being these objects. If it was a product, we could see it. We can't see it, because we aren't 'what it is like to be that'. The radio exists. What is it like to be it? The cells in your feet exist. What is it like to be those living cells? Its not a product, its an aspect of being that matter and energy has. The only way to know, is to be it.
Does this sound far fetched? Go with me for a second and take the idea that you're a physical being. Then you are 'something'. You are the existence of that. Not a chair over there, or the light bouncing around. You are a physical human being, and that is what it is like for you to exist. If you were 'something else' then you would be what it is like to be 'that something else'. Why keep introducing 'something else' when we have no evidence for it? Why introduce unnecessary complexity when we have the simple answer in front of us that works in accordance near perfectly with the behavior aspect of consciousness as well?
Regardless Wayfarer, thank you for tackling those points again. You're an intelligent and well spoken person, and I do enjoy reading your perspective even if I don't always agree on it. We also may be going around and around at this point, and if you feel we're rehashing old ground, you have my respect if you feel there is nothing more to add.
Well said Janus.
Hoffman's theory is that there's no plausible theory that links the physical causes with the experiential feeling.
Quoting Philosophim
The 'unnecessary complexity' you're referring to is philosophy, growing from the awarness that we're not simply physical things.
Quoting Philosophim
:pray: Kind of you to say so.
//
There are a few more points I will make:
Quoting Philosophim
You're not, though. You say:
Quoting Philosophim
That is not what Chalmer's says at all. So stop saying that you're 'interpreting' or 'supporting' Chalmer's argument, when you're actually disagreeing with it. If you were honest, what you would say is 'there is no hard problem as Chalmers describes it'.
Quoting Philosophim
Information itself is not a medium. If I transmit information electronically, the medium is copper or electromagnetic waves, or through speech as sound waves in the air. They are physical media. But the interpretation of information is not a physical process, and information is not physical. Again this is why Norbert Weiner says that 'information is not matter or energy'.
Quoting Philosophim
Humans build radios to do that and then interpret the sounds as meaningful. There is nothing in the 'physical world', if you mean the world outside human affairs, that will do that.
For decades, radio telescopes have been scanning the universe looking for signals from intelligent life. Overall, they've found none (with one possible exception.) All the signals so far have a physical or natural origin. If they found a signal originated by an alien intelligence, it would be something other than physical or natural.
Quoting Philosophim
As noted, psychosomatic medicine, the placebo effect, etc, undercut physicalist accounts of mind.
For many tiny critters, light hits an eyespot, which sends signals to flagella, which react according to that information.
DNA is a better example. The information encoded in it is the blueprint for amino acids and proteins. The interpretation of that information and the production of the amino acids/proteins is the same process.
Quoting PhilosophimIt had not crossed my mind. No worries at all.
Quite agree! That's why biosemiotics and information biology is such a big deal.There's a biological theorist called Marcello Barbieri who addresses this exact point in What is Information? He distinguishes two competing paradigms, the 'chemical' and 'informational' paradigm, the former being more materialist of the two.
He distinguishes that from the infomation paradigm:
I'll leave it to you to read it, but it's a deep question. Suffice to say, I'm more persuaded by what he calls the informational view. But then, I believe there's a real distinction - an ontological distinction - between inorganic matter and life itself, which is why I'm not a materialist. Materialism must deny that distinction, as for it, there is only one kind of substance, and living forms are just 'arrangements of matter'.
Don't expect a resolution anytime soon.
I decided to get Chalmer's words himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=yHTiQrrUhUA
Check out around 6:40. His notes are:
"The hard problem is concerned with phenomenal consciousness: what its like to be a subject.
At 8:26 he goes into the Easy problem. Again, this is about consciousness as behavior.
We have to be careful when we speak of consciousness to understand the implicit aspect that we're talking about. When I say, "Consciousness is your brain" I'm talking about the behavioral aspect of consciousness, which has not been refuted as of today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bejm1mYsr5s
In this video at about 5:40 to the end, he covers what he means by 'consciousness as a subjective experience is immaterial'. He notes its like space, time, etc. Of this, I have no problem. This is a question I've been asking for some time now from you Wayfarer, "What is it for consciousness to not be physical?" Here Chalmers gives a clear reply. And this definition of 'not physical', I have no problem with. Its a classification of category, not a claim that, "It is not matter and energy". Just like we cannot have space without matter, and time without matter, it is not a claim that we can have consciousness without matter. This definition of 'immaterial' is perfectly fine for me. This is because it is the creation of a concept within reality that does not care as to the specifics of its makeup. As long as one does not conclude from this that consciousness exists as some essence apart from the physical reality we live in, its fine.
Quoting Wayfarer
If it is not a physical process, then what is it Wayfarer? I've already described a radio. I've already noted the brain processes information through the senses, and I don't think you deny those are physical. Its fine to claim its not physical, but if you can not demonstrate it as something else, then I don't see it being viable.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ok, but you're not countering the point that information can be interpreted by physical things. If humans are physical, then there is nothing odd with them interpreting information either. I think the only way this works for you is if its assumed that humans aren't physical. Since this is not the general viewpoint, we need to provide evidence that they aren't physical. Otherwise my point that information can exist a physical medium and physical interpretation holds.
Quoting Wayfarer
I was with you until you said it had to be something other than physical. We don't even know if something other than the physical exists.
Quoting Wayfarer
This does not if one assumes that consciousness is an aspect of physical reality like 'wetness'. In which case consciousness is also a part of physical reality, and conscious thoughts could affect the brain and body.
Quoting Philosophim
Right - and he says, straight out:
He says 'there are properties of the world that go beyond atoms and space and time'. It is a claim that whatever consciousness is, it's not included in space-time-matter-energy. He says outright (7:16) we need to add a further property to our inventory of the world's properties, namely, 'consciousness'. He then says, it doesn't mean it has to be located 'up in heaven' or 'in some wholly different realm' - he says it might be an additional property that is associated with matter (a position which is called 'panpsychism'). But it's crucial to recognise that he doesn't say it can be explained in terms of known physical properties. He says that science has to admit consciousness as a fundamental property. By that he means it is irreducible, it can't be explained in terms of something else.
Quoting Philosophim
Well, that's progress, so long as you understand what you're agreeing with.
Quoting Philosophim
I keep trying to explain that this is because of the way that we conceive of 'something other than physical'. As I said already, we see it the way we do, because of the way modern thought has divided the world into 'the physical' (the things science can examine, matters of objective fact) and 'the subjective' (mind, thought, etc), following Descartes, who called the mind 'res cogitans' or 'thinking substance'.
Notice that Chalmer's says that the fact consciousness is not physical doesn't mean it's (7:26) 'up in heaven' or 'in the land of ectoplasm'. He says that because we're inclined to concieve of 'the non-physical' in those terms - ghostly ethereal stuff, thinking substance. So it's a trap! Chalmers is pointing out that we have to approach the whole question in a different way: neither 'physicalism', nor 'immaterialism' in that archaic sense.
Quoting Philosophim
Right. There's your 'thinking stuff' again.
It's great you're digging into this, but you will need to understand that you can't both agree with Chalmer's argument, and also hold that consciousness is physical.
//here is another essay (in .pdf) by Chalmers with a round-up of the various arguments for and against materialism in philosophy of mind. It's quite long but clearly written and may be a useful reference.//
Quoting PhilosophimI can't watch it now. Pushing midnight. So I don't know exactly what he's says, although I've heard and read some of him. But no, that's not there idea. The idea is that, in addition to the physical properties of matter we're familiar with - mass, charge, spin, etc. - properties that we can measure and study with our physical sciences, there is a mental property. Not being physical, we cannot measure and study it with our physical sciences. It is no more removable from matter than mass is. Even though it is not physical, it is not "apart from the physical reality we live in."
I'd sign off on that as in interpretation of Chalmers.
Another, from Bernardo Kastrup:
Oh, I don't agree with it. I just don't have a problem with it. When he defined what it was that was separate from 'physical', I understood what he meant. Chalmers is not asserting that subjective consciousness is necessarily separate from the brain. What he's saying is we can't at this moment measure it as a physical entity, and that I have agreed with the entire time. Just like we can't measure space as a physical entity, nor can we measure time as a physical entity. And in this, subjective consciousness is not 'physical'. But it doesn't mean its apart from the physical, or that its even its own entity.
He's using physical in the sense of 'the physical and mental'. It doesn't mean the mental is existent in some reality, just like being mentally unconscious doesn't mean your physical brain is in a state of unconsciousness. He's not claiming mental as 'some other thing existence'. Its a classification of a state of being. And we know as beings, that we are physical. As long as none of his claims outright deny the idea that consciousness does not have a physical origin, I'm fine with it.
Yes, this is his opinion to the solution of the hard problem, but not the hard problem itself. I still believe what I have said does not contradict what the underlying issue of the hard problem is. I disagree with his solution to the problem, because he also currently has no evidence to deny that subjective consciousness could be an aspect of matter and energy. The only thing he can truly conclude is that we cannot be other matter that has the subjective experience, therefore we cannot measure it. If you listened to the rest of the video, he notes that scientists right now are working to correlate their own subjective experiences with their brain states, something I've noted before. His, "Not physical" at best is using a category that does not require us to know whether it is physical or not. Which here, I have no disagreement again.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, he does not mean that it can't be explained in terms of something else if he is intending it to be like space or time. Space is a concept we use in relation to matter. We measure it with matter, yet space itself is not matter, but the absence of it. Time is not an existent 'material' concept, but it is is determined by watching and recording the differences in materials. Subjective consciousness as well, if it can only be known by being a material, is still known and defined in terms of the material that it is. Chalmers cannot deny this by his own reasoning. Just that we can't directly measure what it is like to be some other thing.
So if he wants to claim subjective consciousness as an existence that cannot be directly measured like space or time, I'm fine with this. He's not claiming that space and time exist apart from matter and energy, and he has no legs to claim with any evidence that consciousness is not in the same boat. This fits fine into the behavior version of consciousness, and simply gives another linguistic approach to the discussion. I certainly don't see it as a paradigm shift. It gives no argument that the brain does not or cannot cause consciousness, or that consciousness could exist without matter and energy. At most, its an option we can explore, of which I have always been open to.
Quoting Wayfarer
Just like Chalmers came up with his ideas using 'thinking stuff' too. He's just a man like you or me. Its fine if you don't agree with my conclusions, but don't discount thinking and questioning ideas, because you will subtly be against it in yourself as well. People move forward and discover by using the proposals, thoughts, and ideas of others as a springboard for new and better ideas. The alternative is dogma, and the elevation of an idea to a pedestal where most do not belong. It is great that you like the idea of subjective consciousness as another category of thinking, but I think the idea that the existence of the hard problem leads to the necessary conclusion that it is some other form of existence unrelated to matter and energy, does not follow.
You're taking issue with it, saying he's mistaken, so don't be too polite about it. :wink:
Quoting Philosophim
A lot is resting on 'aspect' there. You could mean panpsychism, or dual aspect monism or some other view. Certainly as physical beings we are constantly energetic. If you read more of Chalmers, you will see he in no way discounts the neurological perspective. But he says it must be combined with a phenomenological approach because that methodology specficially integrates a first person perspective.
Speaking of evidence - and here we're talking philosophically not scientifically - matter is only known to us contingently and indirectly. We don't know what it actually is. We receive visual and auditory data about it, on that we all agree, and then interpret it. When you say that 'neurons cause consciousness', that they are an aspect of consciousness, that is not in doubt. What that leaves out is the mind that makes the judgement. As it must, because mind is not objective. But then as Schopenhauer says, 'Materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly'.
Quoting Philosophim
What do you make of this, then? it does have bearing as I will explain.
The point being, physicalism only gets to a certain point before having to admit the reality of 'the observer', who is not in the picture. Happens at the other end of the scale, too. It is another aspect of the 'hard problem'.
Quoting Philosophim
I don't think that its another category of thinking. It's the first- and third-person perspectives.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ha ha! No, I genuinely respect Chalmers. How do I explain this...human beings form knowledge and outlooks on life from their perspective. This perspective includes their background, use of language, culture, and their own particular view point on reality. As such, we are all going to have our unique approach to figuring out the world around us. I respect a person's view point that is internally consistent with this background.
As you noted, we are all representing the world the best we can. Hearing of another perspective of how to view that world has always fascinated me. There are people who cannot visualize for example. How different would one's perspective be with that? Someone very short or very tall. Someone incredibly wealthy and another incredibly poor. And of course, 'the average person' (which is more a concept then reality). The fact we're able to come together and have a communicable discussion about reality at all is sometimes a feat in itself. :)
From my own perspective, which of course is just as circumspect as any other perspective, I am a fan of knowledge and communication that is both accurate in assessing reality, and open to the greatest number of people despite our different perspectives. But I'm also aware that there will always be the need for sub-perspectives and different ways of viewing and stating things about the same underlying reality we're all looking at. And sometimes, those sub-perspectives have invaluable points or additions that can and should be brought into the larger perspective.
My disagreement with Chalmer's conclusions is not as a sub-perspective. I don't believe he's in any way noting that it is a fact that subjective consciousness is at its core, necessarily separate from matter and energy. Matter and energy as the building blocks of reality are of course incredibly broad representations of existence around us. To be specific, 'energy' is really just the momentum of matter. And if we wanted to be even more general, its just 'existence'. How we part and parcel that undefinable but all encompassing concept into 'existences' is part of that unique and individual group experience of humanity. His conclusions and word choices within his sub-perspective, can be easily misinterpreted using the language of the general culture. Few people have the learning and background of Chalmer's to truly understand what he is intending, and instead think he means that subjective consciousness is necessarily apart from the brain, and therefore there is a soul, afterlife, etc. That conclusion helps no one.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and this is the point I was trying to get at as well. We don't disagree on this aspect. Like Chalmers I am not asserting that it is the truth that subjective consciousness is necessarily neurological, but he is also not asserting that he truly knows what it is otherwise. What I am stating is out of the available theories that I am aware of, the one which fits in with what science has demonstrated to us over decades about the brain so far, is that consciousness is the experience of being. Every being we know of is 'physical' in the fact that it is made up of matter and energy.
There has never been a discovery to my mind, of some 'thing' which is not matter and energy at its core. While speculation, creative thinking, different perspectives, and experimentation are all to be encouraged, the existence of such possibilities does not mean that at this moment, their existence should override what we know currently works to help us navigate the world and make life preserving and enhancing decisions. It doesn't mean that these exploratory measures won't result in a change to the general understanding of the world in the future, but they must prove themselves as offering some real and tangible value to the general perspective that our current understanding and knowledge does not.
This is a category error. One mistake our brains do over and over again, and I am not immune from this, is elevating concepts that that we have reasoned completely through language as if they are actual representations of reality outside of that language.
Getting stuck in the language and perspective can lead us to think, "Yes, we measure time by observing change. The observation of change requires memory. Memory requires an observer. Therefore time only happens with observers!" Of course, we have to be careful what we mean by time here. "Observed time" would be a more accurate representation of reality. If we're not here, wouldn't the Earth still rotate around the Sun? Of course. Meaning that relations between objects would still persist with the momentum that they have at any X time. If there is no observer to label it as 'time', then that label and concept doesn't exist. But the fact that there wouldn't be a label based off of an observer is what wouldn't exist, not the relation of the matter and energy. Useful labels are descriptors of reality for us to understand, but our 'logical' conclusions involving labels must not be confused with reality itself.
The 'observer' needed for quantum mechanics is also a misunderstanding of descriptions within the context of the math, and mixing them with our common English understanding of the word. Taken from each context, or perspective, they are not the same meaning. Our observations, or our passive existence taking in light, does not change quantum mechanics. Otherwise the rest of space would not exist. Quantum mechanics is a mathematical understanding of particles so small, that our scientific attempts at observation; bouncing a beam of light off of them to measure them for example, affects the particle itself. I've often described it as using a bowling ball to measure the velocity and location of a ping pong ball. The experiment affects the outcome itself, and this leads to mathematically logical limits in outcomes.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have not problem in viewing consciousness from both a first and third person perspective. I just think its the most reasonable case that consciousness is the brain's first person perspective.
If you are interested into a deeper explanation of what I've noted here, I have a post on these forums in which I tackle knowledge. Feel free to give it a read or not. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1
Quoting PhilosophimThe differences in materials come [I]over time.[/I]. Without time, nothing would change.
Quoting PhilosophimRight. And maybe all matter/energy has physical and mental properties.
Quoting PhilosophimI agree. And maybe all matter/energy has a mental property that is a necessary ingredient of consciousness. That would mean consciousness is matter/energy at its core.
Or vice versa.
:up:
Quoting Skalidris
You have so much to say but yet you don't have anything else to add to my remark?
Quoting Skalidris
You wanted a more formal proof of this logic impossibility, are you not satisfied with this one?
Quoting Patterner
I don't see how any reflection on any experience is not after the fact.
Quoting Patterner
That subjective experience seems somehow radically different is not a guarantee that it is so.
Quoting Philosophim
Cheers
Quoting JanusFair enough. Wrong choices of words on my part. You said:Quoting JanusI am aware of seeing something red as I am seeing it.
Quoting JanusThat subjective experience seems somehow radically different is not a guarantee that it is not.
I would still say you cannot see something and be reflectively aware of seeing it in the same moment. Self-awareness seems to me to be always post hoc.
Quoting Patterner
That's true. We just don't know. Maybe we cannot ever know the answer to that question. Perhaps subjective experience is nothing more than an ideaa perennially after the fact idea.
If that were so then consciousness, as Dennett argues, would not be what we think it is.I don't have a firm opinion on this either way. But I do argue against those who claim that the (purportedly self-evident) reality of subjective experience proves that physicalism is necessarily false.
Quoting Janus'Purportedly self-evident'? Do you doubt that you subjectively experience?
I subjectively experience. I do not believe physicalism can explain it. Physicalism tells us there are micro physical properties, like mass and charge. We know how the micro physical properties give rise to macro properties, like liquidity. To characteristics of macro objects, like height. To macro processes, like flight. To characteristics of macro process, like speed.
But we don't have any idea how the micro physical properties give rise to subjective experience. We can't figure it out. And, as I've quoted a few times, Brian Greene, who Has a BA in physics from Harvard, and DPhil (PhD) in theoretical physics at Magdalen College, says the micro properties don't seem to have any connection to consciousness.
Might we find a new physical property of matter that explains it? Although I don't see how objective physical properties could, even in principle, explain it, I can't say it's not possible. But, the mystery being so total, I think trying to find another explanation isn't the moist illogical idea.
That still doesn't mean conscious isn't physical. That's like saying, "We don't understand how rain works, so obviously its not of this world and God must cause it." Everything points to consciousness being physical by every measure of behavior we know. Just because we can't figure out the subjective portion of it in no way entails that its suddenly made of some new non-physical material.
Consciousness is 'something'. The best explanation from what we know is that it is the first person experience of matter and energy when it is organized in a particular way. So far, we understand human consciousness is the brain. You alter the brain, you get reports of people saying their first person experience is altered. Don't get so wrapped up in theory that you forget the decades of medicine and neuroscience behind this.
The point of 'using other language' is just to put the discussion in another contextual model that doesn't require the physical to describe it. That's it. It doesn't mean its physical or not physical, it just means 'we don't talk about it'. People misunderstand this and think, "Oh, that means consciousness isn't the brain!". No, all of our knowledge points that being the only thing which currently makes sense.
Just like back in the day people may not have understood that water turned into gas, and thought that was evidence that water was from another world.
Person: "Water must be magic. It vanishes into nothing in a few days! It must go to God's realm."
Scientist: "Well according to our studies, and our understanding of the conservation of mass and
energy, it turns into something else. All of our studies so far seem to imply it rises up in the air. We're calling it a 'gas'."
Person: "But isn't water a liquid? How can you call a liquid a gas?"
Scientist: "Well technically its still 'water'. Its just that when enough heat happens, it changes enough that its better that we don't call it a liquid anymore. Its invisible, so using a 'gas' model is better. But its still of this Earth."
Person: "So it still could be magic or God right? I mean, water comes from clouds which are clearly visible so they can't be a gas. And how does this 'gas' go from the ground to way up in the sky?"
Scientist: "Yes, its true, we can't study clouds as they're too high in the air. But its probably just water as a gas turning back into a liquid."
Person: "I heard you said its not water anymore, so it could be anything. And since its impossible to study clouds and you can't explain it, its still probably from another world."
This 'conversation' has taken some form or the other throughout centuries of human history. Here we are at consciousness, and the same thing is happening again. The money is on the brain at this point. You can be the 'person' if you want, but I think we should all try to be the 'scientist'.
Quoting PhilosophimIt isn't sudden.
Quoting PhilosophimThat is not an explanation at all. An explanation would tell us why matter and energy organized in a particular way has first person experience. As opposed to it doing whatever it does without first person experience. No physical-only explanation amounts to anything more than "It just happens."
Quoting PhilosophimWe understand that consciousness takes place in the brain. And, since, as far as we know, brains are the only places consciousness takes places, it doesn't make sense to think that the brain isn't essential for consciousness. But that is a different thing from "the brain [I]is[/I] consciousness."
Quoting PhilosophimYes. Change what is happening in the brain, and you will change what consciousness experiences. Just as if you cut off my arms, you will change what my consciousness experiences.
Quoting PhilosophimI can't imagine a way to test the idea I'm talking about, so I can't call it a theory. Still, it is at least an attempt to explain it the way we explain all other macro characteristics and processes. Physicalism simply says, "It just happens. Put things together in a certain way, and you get consciousness. It doesn't have anything to do with the properties of the things you put together, the way every other macro characteristic or process does. There's no connection between the properties of matter/energy and consciousness."
Not saying I'm right and you're wrong, just noting where I'm coming from, and that I think we've each said our piece, and nothing more can be said. :) Genuinely, I hope I'm wrong and you're right. I've had a nice conversation with you, and hope to have many more in the future.
Indeed, we disagree, and neither is likely to switch sides. Heck, we even disagree on which of us is more focused on 'what we want' and 'what is most likely'. Hehe. It's that kind of topic, eh?
Not sure it's possible for the two of us to not talk about it, though. If you say something I disagree with, I'll often want the other person to know there is another pov.
Ha ha! True, it is!
Quoting Patterner
And I greatly appreciate it! I've enjoyed my conversation with you Patterner, you write clearly, intelligently, and I always respect your viewpoint. We'll chat again, I'm sure.
I don't believe it is possible for you to look at your blue shirt and be reflectively aware of yourself doing so in the same instant. Observing my own experience leads me to think that I can't do it at least. You might be more skillful than I. I can't rule that out so I speak only for myself.
Quoting Patterner
I don't doubt that we experience. What I do doubt is that our experience is non-physical. I mean our experience is not a physical object to be sure but I think our intuition that our experience is non-physical is the product of a kind of illusion created by language. An illusion created by reflective thought. The alternative as I see it has to be mind/ body dualism.
I also think that much of the attachment to the idea that experience is non-physical has to do with the wish for immortality which can make us averse to the idea that this life is all there is.
Quoting Skalidris
Quoting Skalidris
Quoting Skalidris
Quoting Skalidris
Its equally true that consciousness cannot be viewed solely as a subject since objects must be acknowledged in order to establish consciousness.
I see no obvious reason why consciousness cannot perceive itself as an object.
Objects are established by descriptions of what they are and what they do apart from opinions and acts of imagination.
There is a well-known counter-example to your claim: Quoting Skalidris
This example is the Measurement Problem.
It gives us a clear example of consciousness observing itself as an object in accord with what an object is and what an object does:
Schödinger's Cat
[i]A thought experiment called Schrödinger's cat illustrates the measurement problem. A mechanism is arranged to kill a cat if a quantum event, such as the decay of a radioactive atom, occurs. The mechanism and the cat are enclosed in a chamber so the fate of the cat is unknown until the chamber is opened. Prior to observation, according to quantum mechanics, the atom is in a quantum superposition, a linear combination of decayed and intact states.
Any future evolution of the wave function is based on the state the system was discovered to be in when the measurement was made, meaning that the measurement "did something" to the system that is not obviously a consequence of Schrödinger evolution[/i].
--Wikipedia
What is consciousness? In our context here, it is a measurement system. This is a fact about consciousness, thus establishing its identity as an object.
What does consciousness do? In our context here, it changes the state of superposition into the state of (well-defined) position.
Grab your right hand with your right hand and report back.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Wayfarer
RH = Right Hand. Now, let me file my report on my right hand grabbing itself.
Report: RH = RH.
Now, it's your turn to respond to one of my things: I say that when I make a claim about something, intending by my claim to establish an objective fact, I simultaneously treat that something as an object.
You argue in your post above that: consciousness cannot treat itself as an object.
If you're right then you're wrong because in making your claim you've established an objective fact
about consciousness. Isn't that what you're trying to do? Well, what you're trying to do is straighten me out about a certain objective fact about what consciousness cannot do. How are you able to do that outside of knowing that fact?
Conclusion: a) If you're right, then you're smack in the middle of paradox a la "This sentence is false;" b) If you're wrong, as in "Consciousness cannot treat itself as an object is wrong." then you're still smack in the middle of paradox: a) if you're right, then you're wrong; b) if you're wrong, then you're right.
Conclusion The subject/object duo cannot be broken apart. Each always implies the other. That's the bi-conditional, isn't it?
Conclusion. If the previous two conclusions are correct, then the theory the conscious is a non-intersecting parallel to the material must pursue its search for support elsewhere.
Quoting JanusAh. I wasn't sure what you meant. Like you, I can only speak for myself. I thought it must surely be physical. Everything is made of particles, after all. At another site (for a series of fantasy books), a guy and I posted for several pages, me trying to convince him that consciousness [I]must[/I] be physical, because everything is made of particles. Well, he ended up convincing me of the opposite. Lol
Still, everything is made of particles, right?? Everything exists because of/is built from particles and the forces. But if consciousness can't arise solely from the physical, which I don't think it can, then maybe there are things in our reality that are not physical. Like an experiential property of matter, in addition to the physical properties. So consciousness arises from matter, but the experiential property is as necessary as the physical properties.
All it takes is for me to accept the possibility that we don't know all the properties of the universe, or matter.
Quoting JanusI'm sure many people believe it for that reason. I'm not among them. I'm 60. I'm not unhappy, looking forward to death, or anything. But the thought of myself going on forever is veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery unappetizing.
My humble thanks. I'm much less well-read than most of you on most of the topics discussed at TPF. I don't always know what anybody is talking about. There's a thread about someone Frege that looks interesting. Problem is, I never heard of Frege. So I'm happy I'm at least writing well about what I think or know.
And right back at you! It's a pleasure.
Ill need photographic evidence in this case ;-)
Quoting ucarr
Fair point. We could say of someone, she has a brilliant mind. In that case her mind is indeed an object of conversation. I could say of my own mind that at such and such a time I was in a confused state, in which case my own mind was the subject of the recollection.
You can also use see metaphorically, as in I see what you mean. But in both cases the metaphorical sense is different to the physical sense.
A related point - the eye of another person might be an object of perception such as when it is being examined by an optometrist. And I can view my own eyes in a mirror. But I cannot see the act of seeing (or for that matter grasp the act of grasping) as that act requires a seen object and the perceiving subject (or grasping and grasped). It is in that sense that eyes and hands may only see and grasp, respectively, what is other to them. That is the salient point.
So the first use of the term object employs a different sense of the term object than the sense it is used when we say the eye cant see itself.
Quoting ucarr
I agree that subjects and objects are co-arising. This is a fundamental principle in Buddhist philosophy. Schopenhauer uses it to great effect in his arguments. But it doesnt address the basic issue, that of whether or in what sense mind or consciousness can be known objectively.
Consider the primitive elements of physics. They can be specified in wholly objective terms of velocity, mass, spin, number and so on. Within the ambit of natural science, then objective judgement is paramount. And with respect to at least classical physics, judgements could always be verified against objective measurement. Nowadays the scope of objective judgement covers an enormous range of subjects. But not the nature of first-person experience, and that is intentional, as the subjective elements of experience were assigned to the 'secondary qualities' of objects in the early days of modern science.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos] The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.[/quote]
That is the background, if you like, that the 'hard problem' is set against. If you don't see that, you're not seeing the problem.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Wayfarer
Write the math onto a marking board, put your right hand alongside the math and then take a picture. The math represents the right hand with bifurcation of its identity; this is a two-in-one of identity elaborated. This is picturing for literal sight of the ultimate self-referential grabbing.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
The radical nature of QM resides in the fact the resolution of Schrödinger's cat paradox is effected literally, not metaphorically. The observational property of consciousness as a) measurement; b) resolution of superposition to simple position is literal, not metaphorical.
These objectified claims about consciousness are not limited to an individual's subjective experience of Schrödinger's cat paradox. QM physics claims it for everyone.
Furthermore, regarding the mind's eye, since our focus is consciousness, within this context even the mind's eye is literal. We're literally talking about the observational property of consciousness and it's mathematical and experimental verification in physics: public, measurable, repeatable.
The stunning revelations of QM arise from it having already objectified consciousness.
In order to deny this objectification, you must defeat both: a) The Copenhagen Interpretation and b) The Many Worlds Interpretation of QM with counter-examples. That means doing science, not philosophy.
Since thought, language and mind do not occur apart from brain, how can you claim brain and mind are parallel?
Regarding emergent properties of the brain, they exemplify the differential circularity of the higher-orders of thermo-dynamics: morphodynamics, teleodynamics.
Quoting Wayfarer
It seems to me that here you're tipping into phenomenology.
Quoting Wayfarer
As I claim, brain is integral to thought, language and mind, not parallel.. So, again, the mind's eye in our focus upon consciousness is literal, not figurative. You exemplify this with your prescription for perception: "eyes and hands may only see and grasp, respectively, what is other to them."
You could not deliver this prescription with authority if your perceptual eyesight were not literal. In the context of consciousness, perceptual eyesight is just as literal as optical eyesight. Were this not the case, you would not be writing declarative sentences about what perceptual eyesight can and cannot do: "...I cannot see the act of seeing." This clause, like the sentence: "This sentence is false." simultaneously declares what it denies. (At the level of perception, in order to make a declaration that you cannot see the act of seeing, you must see it.)
Quoting Wayfarer
You're trying to set boundaries for the context of the HPoC debate.
The central question of the HPoC goes as follows: How is it the case that subjective experience is associated with the physical processes of the brain?
Apparently, you accept the Galileo_Descartes binary of brain/mind as the proper structure and scope of the HPoC debate. Modern physics, with the backing of QM and the measurement problem, rejects the binary as falsity. If you want to defend immaterialism via the binary, then I think you must firstly defend it scientifically. I don't think facile references to emergent properties will be enough.
Im afraid that is word salad. The fact that a hand cannot grasp itself is apodictic.
Quoting ucarr
Not setting - describing. I dont accept the Cartesian division but it is a real factor in culture, which the hard problem argument is intended to reveal.
Quoting ucarr
You might enjoy a recent essay I have composed on that topic.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting ucarr
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not going to let myself confuse incomprehension with unintelligibility. I think I understand the logical connections linking grab right hand with right hand_self-reference_identity operator.* This triad might be unorthodox, but the attempt to express a logical sequence is intelligible even if incorrect.
*The three parts of the triad mirror each other as parallels.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think the apodicsis of your claim is context specific. Since our focus is consciousness, grab becomes "grab." Following from this, I can counter-claim that in the context of consciousness:
Quoting Wayfarer
posits the physical dexterity of a body part into a false parallel with the cognitive dexterity of the mind.
Using your own mind, you conceive the command: "Grab your right hand with your right hand and report back." Then, you command me to carry out the command, not with my mind, as you did in conceiving the command, but instead with the body part which is my physical hand. This is a gross mis-match.
When I carried out your command with my mind, as you did in configuring the command, my cognitive dexterity easily matched your cognitive dexterity.
Furthermore, the bifurcation of: "Grab your right hand with your right hand and report back." is a feature of the mindscape, not of the landscape. You challenge me to treat one unified whole as if it's two independent wholes. In leveling your challenge, you were confident I would fail in the task. But the cheat you enacted took recourse to a feature of the mindscape not found in the landscape.
I've pointed out the false-paralleling of the two modes (mindscape vs landscape). What also needs to be pointed out is the fact you utilized your cognitive dexterity to conceptualize one unified whole as if it's two independent wholes. Your doing this is evidence you yourself don't really believe in the impossibility of reconceptualizing one unity as two independent wholes. This evidence casts doubt on any suggestion you don't understand: grab right hand with right hand_self-reference_identity operator.
Well, if you understand as well as I that the cognitive dexterity of the mind easily bifurcates hands towards word games of context-specific impossibility, then it follows your mind easily bifurcates itself into itself as subject looking at itself as object.
Now we proceed to understand your argument about the subjective self always seeing but never seen makes the same mistake of false-parallelism argued above: the physical self cannot look directly at itself; the cognitive self of the mindscape, on the other hand, has no problem doing so. Since our focus is consciousness, we're contextually concerned with the cognitive self, not the physical self.*
*This distinction is not intended to imply the cognitive self is not also physical. It is true, however, as made obvious in these arguments, that the two modes are not identical.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Wayfarer
Here's evidence in your own words of your belief that upon the mindscape, the subject/object duo cannot be broken apart.
I am not able to simultaneously focus on what I am looking at and the idea that I am looking at it. Could just be me but I doubt it.
Quoting Patterner
It doesn't make conceptual sense to me to say that consciousness is made of particles. 'Consciousness' is a word that demotes being aware. Our bodies are apparently made of particles and very perception and every thought and every sensation and every emotion is a process involving the interactions of particles. I don't believe there is any consciousness that is not in the material sense a physical process. Our subjective experience and our sense of self are most plausibly physical processes, and it is the self-reflective possibilities of language that make it seem not to be so. What is the alternative?
Quoting Patterner
What possible evidence could we have that consciousness cannot arise from the physical? That seems like a mere prejudice to me. All the evidence seems to point to the opposite consclusion.
Quoting Patterner
Personally I love the idea of living forever. But only in a healthy body with all normal faculties and capacities intact. I'm 71.
Quoting JanusAgreed. Neither is flight. Or vision.
Quoting JanusThis is what it all comes down to. Not evidence that it can't. Just no evidence that it can. The fact that the physical properties and forces are all we can find with our science is not evidence that they are solely responsible for consciousness. And it doesn't mean they are all there is. I don't see the logic of saying a bunch of particles bouncing around, if there is nothing but the physical properties and forces, no matter how they are bouncing around, can become aware that they are a bunch of particles bouncing around. That can, and does, explain flight and vision. We can see, starting from the physical properties and forces,how these processes come about. And we can follow any aspect of flight and vision back down to the properties and forces.
Not so for consciousness. Where is it? What is the physical activity in the brain that doesn't produce a physical process, like vision or memory, but, rather, produces consciousness? We don't see physical activity that is not producing some physical process. Nothing accompanies the physical activity that doesn't seem to be doing anything, which we could speculate is consciousness itself.
If some physical activity produces vision, why is there also subjective experience of vision? If the activity that produces vision is tied up with activity that triggers stored patterns of past sensory input, why is there also subjective experience of memory?
Nobody can find anything physical to explain these things, even though some pretty smart neurologists can see remarkable detail about what's going on in our brains. Brian Greene says no physical properties even hints at consciousness.
Quoting JanusYeah, young and healthy would be a requirement. At 60, I got hearing aids for the first time today. So already too late for that. in any event, wanting to live forever is not why I don't think consciousness is solely physical.
I don't find that I can be attentively aware of looking at an object and of myself looking at the object in the same instant. The latter comes very quickly after the former and while it being thought occludes it. That is my experience for what its worth.
Quoting Patterner
I see plenty of evidence that it has, which means evidence that it can. Of course it is not, as is the case with any substantive conjectural posit, proven. It comes down to what seems most plausible. I understand that others may have a different take on what seems plausible than I.
There shouldnt be a report. Back or otherwise, re: objectively with regard to the impossibility of the physical exercise itself, or subjectively with regard to a necessarily irrational construction of an explanation relative to the claim to which the exercise refers.
Hard to tell, innit? Whether definitions set the stage for good philosophy, or get in the way of it.
Quoting Mww
Somebody's gotta say something, otherwise our theater becomes a graveyard. When I mis-speak half-truth, eventually someone will correct me, so in the meantime eat, drink and be merry, and stop sweating the crumbs on the floor.
Ehhhh ..no correcting coming from me. puts out thought-provoking stuff I find worth addressing, is all.
Quoting Patterner
:up:
The eye cannot see itself really has ancient provenance, in the Upani?ads, in the teaching of ?tman, the I am that animates the cosmos:
An online version puts it thus:
This is something which is barely said in the history of Western philosophy, although nowadays one aspect of it has been revived by phenomenology. See It Is Not Known But It Is the Knower, Michel Bitbol (.pdf).
No, consciousness is obviously a flying unicorn, or maybe a rock, or a planet. Consciousness can indeed associate itself with all kinds of objects, but doing so creates a self referential problem, aka the hard problem of consciousness.
Quoting ucarr
So what? How does that have anything to do with this self referential problem?
However, although I believe there are benefits to viewing things that way, I don't have reason to think it's how things are. As I said, I think consciousness can examine itself. The problem is the western world is so adamant that things can only be examined using specific methods. But if the nature of something is not amenable to those methods...
Sidebar -- Firstly, Skalidris, I'm glad you're again posting to your conversation here. After your long absence, I was afraid you'd checked out permanently, and that's less fun.
Quoting Wayfarer
Wayfarer above makes a good point. Herein, we're all talking about consciousness, voicing factual claims about it. These actions treat consciousness as an object grammatically speaking: "voicing factual claims about it." Predicate: voicing claims; Preposition: about; Object: it. Grammatically speaking, if you can predicate claims about something, then that something is an object, a thing. It's out there in reality to be examined and understood. If it's not out there, then what the heck are we talking about in this conversation? If subjectivity were ineffable, nobody would be talking about it. Nearly everybody talks about it at one time or another. I'm not seeing any modal difference between the efforts of neuroscience and the efforts of the typical layperson trying to understand the human psychology of their families and friends.
I think subjectivity and objectivity are always paired; I suspect their relationship is the bi-conditional logical operator. Regarding Nagel's: "There's something that it's like to be a bat." I'm waiting for an immaterialist to prove logically the necessity of the metaphysical separation of subjectivity from objectivity.
I'm trying to understand why the obvious grammatical objectification of consciousness doesn't carry over into objective reality. I don't, however, want to sidetrack us into lengthy discussions about the limitations and distortions of language; we all know that's a full topic unto itself.
Quoting Skalidris
I take this to be the heart of your premise for this conversation. I'll try to parse it:
"Consciousness can indeed associate itself with all kinds of objects..." Why is this not a simple and clear example of one thing: consciousness, associating itself with other things: all kinds of objects? Isn't connection of things to things what "associate" means?
No, I haven't forgotten the immaterialist mantra: "Consciousness is not a thing." I know, your above statement is not literal. So what is it saying? If consciousness is not a thing, how does it perform actions, like "associate itself with all kinds of objects." Usually, subjects who execute actions are things. It's hard to authorize pundits who make statements that grammatically contradict the intended meanings of said statements.
"...but doing so creates a self referential problem, aka the hard problem of consciousness."
Have you elaborated how it is the case that when one thing associates itself with another thing, with one of the things being consciousness, a self-referential problem always ensues? Do either Nagel or Chalmers examine this self-referential problem?
Yes. Indeed you have a problem making predications about a subject that's not a subject. From the get-go, you're inhabiting the realm of paradox.
Quoting Skalidris
Your first sentence implies consciousness cannot examine itself. Can you explain how this is the case given the fact that, in this very instant, we are examples of consciousness examining itself? If we're not doing that, then what are we doing?
In the second sentence you mysteriously claim "Consciousness can only be viewed as consciousness..." as if consciousness viewing itself doesn't objectify itself. In order to make your claim consciousness is not an object, you have to turn it into an object.
Can you explain why this premise is not an impossible premise leading to the logical circularity you're propounding?
You claim consciousness is not approachable by setting up yourself in a paradox, then claim the paradox you've created is the proof objective examination of consciousness is impossible. Well, yeah, by your own setup.
Suppose we discard your premise and replace it with another premise: consciousness can examine itself. This gets us out of the paradox, at least grammatically speaking.
Can you show why we're still existentially locked within paradox and circularity when consciousness tries to examine itself?
Quoting Skalidris
Quoting Skalidris
Above I've underlined an important sentence. I'm surmising it expresses your core belief there is no possible materialist explanation connecting brain functions with subjectivity. I'm guessing you justify this belief by taking recourse to emergence and supervenience. I think your core belief is supported by a metaphysical commitment: consciousness exists outside of the subject/object bi-conditional.
If, as you imply, consciousness is thwarted by the self-referential state into useless circularity, then that's a claim that supports: consciousness exists outside of the subject/object bi-conditional.
Do you have an argument to support this claim?
How can it be that consciousness exists outside of the subject/object bi-conditional?
I'm supposing immaterialism puts forward consciousness as its star witness for the possibility of existence uncoupled from materialism, and this uncoupling is centered within the circularity to which you refer.
You name the possible premises; do you name the impossible premises?
Let me try to name an impossible premise: a subject that is not its own object.
Can an existing thing not be self-referential (to itself) as an object? If it can, we must ask where is it located in space and time (both of which are material)?
Speaking generally, existence precedes essence and, speaking more specifically, brain precedes mind, at least from the materialist point of view: brain and mind always co-exist, but there's no thought without brain, as demonstrated causally by the maxim: absent brain, absent mind.
Of course, immaterialism posits existence of essences outside of space and time.
Are we now afoot within Kant's transcendental idealism? Are we hearkening back to its ancestor, Platonic idealism?
No. Today's immaterialists have probably nuanced their positions beyond Kant.
What if: "when we ask ourselves 'why are these materialistic phenomena accompanied by experience?', we trigger a self referential explanation that has no other outcome than being circular..." is an important clue to the reason why consciousness as an objective thing appears to be immaterial?
I'm suggesting consciousness as a phenomenon is rooted in mnemonic echoings upwardly mobile through higher-orders of the self-referential. These higher-orders are essential to subjectivity. They play fast and loose with matter, but never uncouple from it completely.
The abstractionism of multi-tiered feedback looping via neuronal circuits of the brain is how we arrive at useful concepts such as infinity, sets and Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis.
Mnemonic circularity, ethereal but still material.
I think there's been a misunderstanding: I don't believe consciousness is an illusion, and I don't believe it is immaterial, I believe we cannot know either of these things.
The hard problem of consciousness arises when one believes consciousness can successfully study (and explain) itself as an object in the world. And the problem is that you need consciousness to study anything. If you've ever heard of primitive notions, it's the same principle: you cannot define and explain primitive notions with concepts other than themselves. Have you ever tried to explain what a "unit" is? What the logic connector "and" means? To use the latter example, imagine our brain had some kind of logic gate (in electronic circuits) that serve as "and" connector, we would know that whenever we use "and" or any process of linking things together, we use that logic gate. So naturally, we could try to define "and" as the physical process. It could be: And is a circuit that receives several inputs and gives an output of 1 if all inputs are 1. You can see that and is already in the definition and even if we try to phrase it differently to avoid the and, youll still need to talk about the several inputs being received, and whats several? It is at least one unit AND another. Do you see the circularity?
Quoting ucarr
So even if we can associate physical processes with consciousness, we cannot break down the intuitive meaning into smaller parts, and breaking something into smaller parts is how we explain things. In other words, consciousness can examine the physical processes responsible for its existence, but it cannot examine its intuitive meaning inside the mind. Just like we can't explain what "and" means (using other concepts) even if we knew the physical processes behind it.
Quoting ucarr
Because of the premise that consciousness is required for any explanation, any thought (including the perception of objects).
To go back to the "and" example, any definition or description of the material processes behind "and" includes the concept "and".
Quoting ucarr
No, it simply implies that we do not know. We don't know if it's material, causal, an illusion, we can't know anything because we use it to build any knowledge...
Quoting ucarr
I agree. That's why we can study the physical processes responsible for consciousness. Just how we could explain the "And" logic gate but yet never be able to explain the "And" concept.
Quoting Skalidris
You're telling me the category type for consciousness is unknowable.
Quoting Skalidris
You're telling me the category type being unknowable is intimately tied to consciousness being necessary to the examination of consciousness.
Quoting Skalidris
You're telling me "and" is fundamental, and thus cannot be analyzed down to smaller parts.
Quoting Skalidris
You're telling me the intuitive meaning of consciousness inside the mind is fundamental.
Quoting Skalidris
You're telling me examination of "consciousness," like examination of "and," always leads to a circular definition, and thus the identity of these terms cannot be illuminated by analysis.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Skalidris
In this case, I think your claim: consciousness examining consciousness always leads to circularity implies beyond doubt that self-examination, in the case of consciousness, cannot lead to a bi-conditional interweave of subject/object. This, in turn, implies subjectivity is pure; it stands outside of the subject_object duet. Mysteriously, this has something to do with the claim: we can't examine how subjectivity arises from brain functions.
Quoting Skalidris
So far, I'm not understanding why you think the concept of the conjunction operator cannot be explained: ¬ {x ? Y} both x and y are negated; {¬{x} ? {y}} x is negated, y is not. By contrasting "and" with "or," the two operators clarify and explain each other. In other words, the "and" operator is an attractor that puts multiple members into one set, whereas the"or" operator is a separator that puts multiple members into separate sets, as demonstrated by the two expressions above. Now there, I've defined the "and" operator without any circularity.
The purpose of the quote from Indian philosophy was mainly to demonstrate the provenance of the aphorism that 'the eye cannot see itself' and its link to phenomenology.
Quoting Skalidris
I do. It's that 'primitive' concepts like "and", "equals", "is", "is not" are required for any form of rational inference. That includes rational inference about consciousness.
Quoting Skalidris
First, isn't being conscious subjective?
At least I assume that somebody that is conscious is a subject: he or she or it can think and act on it's own choosing. The acting is not a simple mechanism like throwing a burning matchstick in a pool of gasoline and the liquid blowing up. And Philosophers like Chalmers and Searle hold that consciousness is necessarily subjective or first person in character and that subjectivity is an ontological feature of consciousness. So at least here I'm not way off.
But let's think about this.
If subjectivity is an ontological feature of consciousness, can we then really accurately model consciousness with a conventional model, that is objective?
Let me try to explain what I'm after here: If we try to model consciousness objectively, the rules of objectivity come immediately into consideration and we have a logical problem in modelling this subjectivity. We usually end up with some kind of a black-box model: something is happening in our "black box", in our brains, and somehow, out comes consciousness. In the black box happens something, what could be said to be our consciousness.
And then we start to compartmentalize just where is this "black box" and how it works... usually in a similar fashion that we model some engine, computer or network. Yet we are still looking at all of this objectively from the outside, think that the logic here is equivalent to some simple mechanical or chemical reaction that a scientist can easily do in the lab. Especially as something that you can give a computable model.
The logic of the subjective is likely different from this.
Presumably, Science studies reality "as-is", while Philosophy studies the world "as-if"*1. That's why scientists observe the Brain, but philosophers imagine the Mind. Consciousness is not a material object, but our Minds can picture the state or qualia or function of Knowingness*2 as-if it is an object-of-interest in a hypothetical context.
What makes the scientific study of a metaphysical concept "hard" is the tendency to analyze the Function*3 of the brain as-if it's the material product of a mechanism instead of the immaterial purpose of that system. Metaphysical disputes are "impossible to solve" analytically, they can only be resolved holistically --- by placing the parts into a universal context. Not by substance dualism, but by essence monism.
If we can't agree on the Nature*4 of the Cosmic context --- Materialism vs Idealism or Physical vs Metaphysical --- we will continue to disagree on the possibility of an emergent Mind-function. Ideas are "hard to see". Hence, factionally "impossible to solve". :smile:
*1. As if thinking concerns the ability to think in some imagined context other than the reality that is presented in front.
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_5-1
Note --- As-Is thinking looks at actual things. As-If thinking looks at possible states.
"A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional and modal logic." ___Wikipedia
*2. [i]What is another word for knowingness?
synonyms: awareness, cognisance, cognizance, consciousness.[/i]
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/knowingness
Note --- The suffix "-ness" means "state, condition, or quality"
*3. A "function" refers to the specific purpose or role something or someone has, essentially describing what something does or is designed to do;
___Google AI overview
*4. "The nature of" is an expression that refers to the basic character or quality of something."
___Google AI overview
"Grab your right hand with your right hand and report back." Wayfarer
IMPOSSIBLE IDEA : AS-IF not as-is
Are you saying that scientists should simply leave the Mind/Body problem to impractical philosophers? I suspect that pragmatic scientists and Buddhists, with no metaphysical axe to grind, would agree with you : "shut-up and calculate"*1. Yet, metaphysical monistic Materialists also simplify the "problem" by insisting that Mind is nothing but Matter doing what comes naturally*2. So, they resolve the "problem" by telling Idealistic philosophers to butt-out.
The OP concluded that the circularity of the Science vs Philosophy battle makes the problem insoluble*3. If it's as simple as you imply, why can't we drive a stake into the heart of the Hard Problem? Maybe the eternal recurrence of this topic is due to the Materialism vs Idealism divide within philosophy. My unorthodox BothAnd philosophical worldview simplifies the problem by assuming a monistic substance (Information) that can exist as both Matter and Mind. Problem solved! :wink:
*1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is only hard within the context of materialism.
https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/comments/169rqih/hard_problem_of_consciousness_is_not_hard/
*2. Some argue that the hard problem of consciousness is not actually hard, and that it can be solved through further analysis of the brain and behavior:
___Google AI overview
*3. Excerpt from the OP :
"Let's first assume that the hard problem of consciousness is not the lack of scientific knowledge in that domain but the paradox it creates when thinking of consciousness as an object in the world. Any materialistic theories about it is followed by this question "why are these materialistic phenomena accompanied by experience?". And any materialistic attempt to answer that question also ends up being followed by the same question, creating a circularity that seems impossible to escape."
____Skalidris
Okay, now define "multiple" :razz: . Have you ever tried following the definitions in a dictionary, looking up each word used in a definition, only to discover it eventually loops back to the same terms? There's no escaping the circularity but you can try if you want to see it for yourself!
multiple | ?m?lt?p(?)l |
adjective
having or involving several parts, elements, or members
The Apple Dictionary
Quoting Skalidris
If you configure a circle of any size, and you construct it by using the sequence: apple_orange_pear, you can start at any point in the circle and stop at any other point on the circle, and the three parts remain distinct. If you make a complete circle from, say, an apple back to itself, it's not conflated with either the orange or the pear.
Quoting Skalidris
Above you say "and" is undefined. "Circular" and "undefined" are two different things. If you cannot define something, you cannot establish it as distinct from other things. In other words, if you cannot say what something is, you also cannot say what it isn't.
In this example here, and in the previous example from 22 days ago, I establish "and" as distinct from other things.
Define several.
Quoting ucarr
I don't understand what you mean. Do you agree that it's circular?
Quoting ucarr
If it's circular, if it sends back to itself directly, then you cannot define it in a meaningful way. In other words, you cannot explain it, break it down into smaller parts. And you could "know" when something is even if you cannot define it: we can feel when we're conscious but that doesn't mean that we can explain it and define it in a meaningful way.
Quoting Skalidris
In a relationship between a thing and a sign that points to it, we find meaning. At the fight club, guys engage with each other in bare-knuckle fighting for the excitement and satisfaction of it. There's the fight club, the thing itself. There's also the raised fist, the sign that secret fight club members raise to each other when they cross paths on the street. So, the raised fist, the sign, "points" to the fight club. The sign "means" fight club.
Consider that the sign, i.e., the raised fist, is also a thing. Pretend for a minute there is no fight club. Theres only the raised fist. If theres only the raised fist, we can say the raised fist means the raised fist. If we let A = raised fist, then we can say the raised fist means the raised fist another way: A = A.
A = A is the circularity youre talking about.
Within the scope of this equation, theres only A defined in terms of A. This definition is not useful because its journey from start to finish adds nothing to the start point.
Dont make the mistake of exaggerating the scope of jurisdiction of circularity over meaning.
A thing not usefully meaningful within circularity can be usefully meaningful outside of circularity.
If A = raised fist and B = fight club, then we can say A means B.
In the scope of this equation, A is usefully meaningful.
So, as with the case of A herein, the conjunction logical operator "and" likewise can be defined meaningfully, as I've already shone in an earlier post.
Yes, yes, yes.
The naming of somethinganything at allthe describing it, the identification of it, the indication of it, the characterisation of itis the objectification of it, the making of it into an object, the reification of it, the conceiving it as something material, or as something physical.
So the very pointing towards experience, towards the subjective, is the materialisation of it.
(It is not a coincidence that we typically think of objectsthings perceived, or known, or apprehendedas material things.)
So either you point to experience (in some way or other), in which case you make it into something physical, or you concede that it cannot be pointed to at all.
Indeed the very process of thought, the very project of philosophy, is the materialisation of Reality.
What is impossible is the identification of the subjective, of experience, or indeed of anything at all that is non-physical, as something non-physical. There isnt some special, as-yet-undiscovered way of objectifying experience that neither materialises it nor fails to respect its non-material nature.
This is not to say that Eliminatism is false (though in fact I believe it is false).
And nor is to say that it is impossible to identify experience (though I believe that it is impossible).
It is only to say that experience cannot be characterised as something non-physical.
Perhaps you could articulate your objection with reference to the main article, Facing Up to the Problem of Consiousness, David Chalmers.
Dissolving the Mysteries of Consciousness
Consciousness is a brain process. It cannot float around in space by itself. Every so-called thing is a process, an event, some of which may continue for a long time, like a tree or the sun.
The content in consciousness correlates to what the brain has already analyzed and produced in the subconscious, this neural voting being quick, but not instant, taking about 300-500 milliseconds. The content reflects the brains mapping, which map is the territory since the noumena are left behind.
Consciousness makes no reference to brain states, which is called referral.
Neuroscience informs us of the projection of neural states with no perceiving of neural firings/states, else we wouldnt know about the basement first storey, being unaware of it in our already written conscious second story.
So, consciousness is not live, but a kind of tape-delayed broadcast, ever showing the just past. Thus consciousness does not cause anything right then and there, for it arrives too late in the process. This rather tricks us into thinking that consciousness is in control, as directly causal.
The consciousness brain process is ever ongoing; other interested brain areas will respond with their products, and so it goes, even into long ruminations.
[i]Conscious is Compositional; It is structured with many phenomenological distinctions. It is Intrinsic, as ones own, as independent. It is Informational, as particular and specific. It is Integrated/Whole, as Unified and no longer Reducible. It is Exclusive, as having Definite content, no more and no less.
It is Subjectively felt. In addition to the referral already mentioned, there is Mental Unity, as Experienced as a unified field, whereas its sources are all over the brain.
There are Qualia, as the felt qualities of sensory consciousness. It has Continuity, as the seamless stitching of the ongoing changing contents.
Mental causation?How can consciousness itself right then and therean intangible, unobservable, and fully subjective entitycause material neurons to direct behaviors that change the world?[/i]
Subconscious brain analysis, taking 300-500 milliseconds to complete, is all done and finished in its result before consciousness gets hold of the product.
[i]Consciousness has Uses/Advantages over such as reflexes or all purpose schemes, for it grants Flexibility of Reaction, as were better able to react to conscious content, in our further subconscious decisions beyond just the automatic reflex-like responses triggered by non conscious content. Theres Focus, as Selective Attention allows the brain to focus its activity on whats important, so that our subconscious decisions can attend to that foremost.
It grants Evaluations, the Feelings make one aware of what is good or bad, from both emotions and logic. It grants Survival Value, as Complex decisions are possible.
We have Behavioral Flexibility, as unlimited associated learning combines multiple cues into a single perception. Theres Discrimination, making small perceptual differences possible, such as between good and poisonous food.
For Diversification of Species, such as in the Cambrian explosion and a kind of evolutionary arms race in finding new ways to avoid detection, spurring predators to become more sophisticated. Beauty appears, such as plants evolving colorful flowers to attract pollination.[/i] For Actionizing, as the pondering of the consequences of scenarios before committing to action.
There is reality out there, for sure;
We have senses to take it in, as pure.
The brain paints a useful face upon it,
Such as colors for wave frequencies, etc.
Consciousness is ever a brain process,
One which can be halted, never-the-less,
By anesthesia, poison/drugs,
A blow to the head, a faint, or by sleep.
Change the brain and consciousness changes too.
Take drugs and the emotions change, anew.
Damage the brain and the minds damaged too.
Consciousness emerges only from the brain!
In identifying consciousness,
We often confuse what is floating in
The stream of consciousness with the water itself;
Thus, we note not the sea in which we see.
The brain interprets reality, and puts
A face on the waves of sound, light, color, touch,
And a sense on molecules smell and taste.
Consciousness is the brains perception of itself.
Consciousness mediates thoughts versus outcomes,
And is distributed all over the body,
From the nerve spindles to the spine to the brain
A way to actionize without moving.
[i]Physics describes well the extrinsic causes,
While consciousness exists just for itself,
As the intrinsic, compositional,
Informational, whole, and exclusive
As the distinctions toward survival,
Though causing nothing except in itself,
As in neer doing but only as being,
Leaving intelligence for the doing.[/i]
The posterior cortex holds correlates,
For this is the only brain region that
Cant be removed for one to still retain
Consciousness, it having feedback in it;
Thusly, it presents a unified Whole,
And this Whole forms consciousness directly,
A process fundamental in nature,
Or its the brains own symbolic language.
The Whole can also be well spoken of
To communicate with others, as well as
Globally informing other brain states,
For nonconscious states know not whats been formed.
Yes, how? Do tell!
Well, the result in consciousness of the reflected prior subconscious voting/analysis does not cause what it is about in consciousness, for it comes too late in the process, but perhaps the result is an input to further subconscious figuring; however, I don't see why the subconscious couldn't just continue on its own without the quale of what it just came up with, unless qualia are part of the brain's own invented communication language that it has to use.
[i]Though causing nothing except in itself,
As in neer doing but only as being,
Leaving intelligence for the doing.[/i]
So they seem to be hewing to the same path as the late Daniel Dennett. And I don't think he even addresses the hard problem, although I'm not going to launch into an argument about it all over again. It's too hard! ;-)
(Incidentally Rose's book is Can Neuroscience Change our Minds? which looks much more congenial to my way of thinking.)
Likewise, I cannot experience the true essence of myself, but only have a model for myself. I think of consciousness as my model for myself. Or perhaps, the model of my model.
Thus, I conceive of consciousness not as existing or not existing in a binary, but as a continuum of less or more sophisticated self-models. So, a bird grooming itself must have at least a very rudimentary model of self, and anyone practicing psychology must have a very advanced model of the self.
I do not see why having self-models has to be more mysterious than models of external objects. I suppose a necessary component of self-models is that they are recursive/reflexive, whereas models of external things point in only one direction (outwards).
Since the model as the content of consciousness binds everything together in a unity and seamlessly stitches onto it the new events going along, then this must be a useful input into further brain analysis, else why would there be qualia.
So you're saying that the way you defined "and" isn't A = A?
You defined it as: "the "and" operator is an attractor that puts multiple members into one set"
You used multiple to define it but multiple is just a step further from "and" (if you take one element AND another, you have MULTIPLE elements). It has the concept of "and" inside of it. If A = B but the only meaningful way to define B (or an element within B) is B = A, it's the same as A = A. It's only meaningful in language, if you don't know the word for "and" and that someone tries to explain what that means, they can use words that you know that imply the concept "and", but that doesn't mean they've defined it in a meaningful way. It's like explaining a child what a "number" is and how to do 1+1=2, all you're really doing is giving them words to describe concepts they already have. For addition, you just show two units and say "this and this becomes two", you're only giving them labels. If you were to explain this concept to an alien for whom it is not intuitive, you'd fail because all we can do for "primitive concepts" is label them, we can't explain them. Do you agree?
To me, a meaningful definition is when you're able to define it by using more fundamental elements. if A is made of B and C, Saying A = B?C is meaningful. But if A is an element of C and that C= B?A, defining A as C without B isn't meaningful. It's only useful if you don't know the word for A, but know the word for B and C.
Quoting Skalidris
The way I defined "and" does not say "A = A."
Quoting Skalidris
Here's the correct translation of my verbal equation to a math equation: Given A, A (two unconnected, identical machine parts), with the entrance of the conjunction operator [math]?[/math] we get
{[math]A?A = 2A[/math]}.
A = A is not a multiplicity of A twice; it is one A, itself.
Quoting Skalidris
No. I did not use "multiple" to define the conjunction operator. I used "attractor" to describe what it does: connect. Perhaps you'll argue that connecting is just the same as multiplying. They're related, but they're not identical. We can prove this by showing how 3+4 = 7, whereas 3x4 = 12.
Also, as you say, multiple is just a step further from and . Well, one step further is a positive distance from the previous step, so the two positions are different. What this means in our context here is that
Quoting Skalidris
Your description shows us that the conjunction operator is a function that renders a connection linking multiple parts. This process that renders connected parts is distinct from the connection it produces. The connection is the result of the process. We know the two things are distinct because parts dont connect without a process that renders the connection. An example is a truck and the trailer it pulls. The truck and the trailer dont connect unless theres a trailer hitch that performs the function of connecting the two.
Suppose "trailer hitch" is defined as "a connector that links truck and trailer." This definition has the same form as "...the "and" operator is an attractor that puts multiple members into one set." I want you to show how both definitions are indistinguishable from the definition of "and."
Quoting Skalidris
The underlined part of your quote is incorrect. With A = B, you've set up an equation of the type:
5 = 2+3. This is not A = A, which could be 5 = 5, or 2+3 = 2+3. A and B, as your eye can see, are not identical, as the case with A = A. Stop conflating equivalent with identical.
When you stop conflating equivalent with identical, youll see clearly that saying: He tried to bother me. differs from saying: He tried to harass me. The two verbs are roughly equivalent, but certainly not identical.
Quoting Skalidris
If A is an element of C such that C = {A?B}, then defining A as C is a non-sequitur.
For clarity, consider you have a pizza with mushrooms and bell pepper toppings. This establishes bell pepper as an element of the pizza. Does it make sense to go from there to saying bell pepper equals the pizza?
I now see that your argument denounces my definition as redundant. The issue in our debate is whether my definition is distinct from Websters definition of and. This is a very different issue from arguing that a definition is neither meaningful or useful. Since you've used these words to make your argument, claiming my definition possesses neither attribute, I've been assuming they accurately express the point of contention. They don't.
Although my definition says nothing not already said, I claim it is still distinct from Websters definition of and. My definition emphasizes connect within the context of set theory.
As I now think you're saying a fundamental definition cannot be redefined usefully because of redundancy, I go along with you most of the way, but not all of the way because of the issue of context. If its best to insert 5 into one context, whereas its best to insert 2+3 into another context, then that stands as a minor example of usefully spinning a fundamental definition.
Quoting ucarr
You did, you used multiple in the definition. If you only want to used attractor, when you define attractor, you'll still have two use a word similar to multiple, several, and, connect, which all contain the same essence that's fundamental and can't be defined in a meaningful way (or, since you don't like saying that, it simply can't be explained). In other words, if you can't define/explain "and" with smaller parts it's made of, it creates the circularity, the self reference. Do you know what I mean or don't you? Because it's not clear from your response, I'm not sure about where you're going with this.
Quoting ucarr
Multiple isn't the same as multiplying... Just as you said here.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting ucarr
No, the problem I mention is when A = 7-2 rather than 2+3. But the analogy with numbers doesn't work because we know that we can break down 5 in a lot of ways, and the problem I mentioned is when 5 can't be broken down into smaller units, smaller operations. Basically the question "how do you make 5?" is left unanswered and the only way to "define it" is to take a "bigger" category and remove other elements from it, or to use synonyms.
Quoting ucarr
Bell pepper equals pizza (containing bell peppers) minus all the other elements. That's what I meant when I said "C without B", it means C minus B.
Quoting ucarr
Again, no, I did not say that. I mentioned the use in language here:
Quoting Skalidris
Quoting ucarr
Yes, trouble is that, in the context of primitive notions, you can't define 5 as an addition of smaller parts.
:rofl:
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Skalidris
Quoting Skalidris
Quoting ucarr
I need to change my definition as follows:
Quoting ucarr
The word changes do not alter the meaning of the definition except to make it a more accurate description: to connect by linking things together.
and (conjunction) -- used to connect things that are to be taken jointly
multiple (adjective) -- having several parts
When you look at the two definitions, why do you think they are one and the same?
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Skalidris
Regarding the equation with the multiplying function, why do you deny that 12 is a multiple of 3 and 4?
Quoting Skalidris
It's true prime numbers are limited as to how they're factored, but your argument includes more than the primes.
Quoting Skalidris
This statement says bell pepper stands alone, or B = B. B [math]?[/math] B + P
Quoting ucarr
This is true.
You're saying when the terms of a fundamental definition are not known to someone, synonymous terms of equal meaning known to that person are useful in the effort to communicate the definition to them.
This is true.
What Chalmers thinks Experience Is
Chalmers says It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis. This is true. Chalmers speaks for an orthodoxy. He speaks not just for himself, but for an age, for a zeitgeist.
Chalmers says that experience cannot be characterised by reducing it to physical terms. This, I believe, is a valid point.
However his analysis of experience is hobbled from the start by a misunderstanding of experience and a mischaracterisation of it.
And whilst he overtly states that experience may not be reduced to the physical many remarks that he makes indicate that in fact he does think of experience as something physical.
His list of relatively easy problems of consciousness straightaway reveals an unclear grasp of what he is talking about. His list fails to identify the critical distinction between our sense of the body or brain as something physical and our sense of it as something that has a will. He divides up mental categorisation into two separate problems. He divides up cause and effect issues into two, and puts one of them in with one of the categorisation problems. He includes within this list a problem that goes right to the heart of the hard problem.
So I would divide up these problems in the following way:
The ability to discriminate, categorise and integrate information in the way a piece of filter paper in a funnel set over a beaker divides up dirty water into dirt and water. It discriminates between dirt and water, integrates the separate parts of water with one another, in the beaker below, and integrates the bits of dirt with one another on the top of the piece of filter paper, and it categorises things into the categories, Pure Water and Pure Dirt.
The ability to focus attention in the way a blast furnace extracts iron from iron ore. Just as only the most intense stimulus gets through to the brain from the senses, so only the heaviest material in the blast furnace, ironbecause it blocks the way for all other lighter material because of its weightpasses out of the trap door at the base of the blast furnace.
The ability to react to environmental stimuli in the way a stone reacts to the sun, by warming up. React is a Newtonian word. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A dead frog is galvanised by electricity. Something is prodded and it yells. This is cause and effect.
The difference between wakefulness and sleep in the way a smoke detector behaves differently in the presence of smoke whether or not it is wrapped in a material that partially prevents smoke from getting to it.
The ability to choose to discriminate, integrate and categorise in a way that you please. The ability to choose to focus you attention in a way that you please. The ability to choose a certain behaviour over another.
The ability off a system to access and report on its mental states.
The first four identify experience with physical processes. That Chalmers calls these problems relatively easy consciousness problems shows that he thinks of consciousness as physicalin spite of his overt avowal that it may not be understood as something physical. The second two of these identify experience with cause and effect, which is to identify consciousness with a physical process, (but, by the by, there is nothing even relatively easy about the topic of cause and effect, and so even it is a consciousness problem, it is not a relatively easy one).
The fifth is to do with the relationship of consciousness to the will. Either Chalmers thinks we are just mechanisms, and that free will is illusory, in which case again, he is identifying consciousness with something physical, or he thinks there is such a thing as free will, in which case the fact that will is associated with consciousness makes this certainly not a relatively easy problem.
The last of these I am going to talk about in a minute. It is, I believe, not separate from his hard problem but goes right to the heart of it.
In other remarks it is revealed that Chalmers in fact thinks experience is something physical.
Experience arises from the physical. Though it seems likely that he chose this word particularly so as not to identify the relationship between experience and the physical as that of causation, it does suggest a relationship of dependence, one-way dependence, of which causation is one version, indeed perhaps the paradigmatic version. Something, Y, arises from something else, X, when, whilst Y is non-identical to X, nevertheless somehow all the ingredients for Y are already contained within X. Y is independent of X in that the removal of Y would not also be the removal of Xyou could take away experience but the physical would remainbut Y is not independent of X in that the removal of X would also be the removal of Yif you took away the physical you would take away experience too. So within X, within the physical, you have everything you need to make Y, experience.
Experience is something based on a whirr of information processing. In other words it is based on something that is like a computer.
Experience is something that organisms have, which are physical things. It is located where organisms are located.
Experience is a fundamental property. Property is a word we use for things like mass, charge, spin, colour, texture, hardness, etc.: physical things. Of course a person can have the property of being lazy, or spontaneous, or conscientious, but we dont usually use the term property in these contexts.
Experience is a bit like electromagnetism in that it is just a given. It is not something to be explained in the way that matter is not something to be explained. It just is. It is at the end of the line of explanation; it is an explanans, not an explanandum.
However at the same time Chalmers argues that experience may not be explained and understood by reference to the Physical, and that it is something that is to be solved, that it is a problem, indeed a hard problemin the way that the existence of matter say, is not something to be solved, is not a problem.
So what is Chalmers saying? Is he saying experience is a problem? Or is he saying thathaving identified experience as something fundamental, like electromagnetism, only differenthe has in fact solved the essence of the problem?
What Chalmers Thinks the Hard Problem of Consciousness Is
So what is the hard problem, according to Chalmers?
Experience is a kind of stuff, that has an identity with brains, or with the information processing of brains. It is in the same place as the brain. It is a mode of presentation of the physical; it is of the physical, but not the physical itself.
Chalmers would want to say that of the two, the physical and experience, only experience is directly accessible to us. There is something underlying experience, the Physical, but we can only really infer it.
I think however that what is going on in Chalmers mind, when he is identifying his problem is this. Take his example of the sound of a clarinet. He has two processes that he is comparing. One of them is what you might see through a microscope, of the timpanum vibrating, the transmission of this vibration through the bones of the ear, the pulse of electicity that travels from them to the aural region of the brain (with attendant releases of tiny quantities of chemicals)then further, and more complex, pulses of electricity (and releases of tiny quantities of chemicals). Etc., etc. Then, contrasted with this, there is the sound of the clarinet that we hear. All we can really say about that sound is that it is clarinet-sound-like.
These two ideas of what is going on when we hear a clarinet, which appear so different, are in fact, puzzlingly, the same thing. Why is there this extra thing, the clarinet-sound-like sensationover and above what is at its basis, the neurological information processing? How do they seem so different when there is some identity between them? (They are in the same place; they happen at the same time, you can correlate elements from the one the various notes, for examplewith the other; if you take away the information processing, you take away the clarinet sound too.) How is this one thing, me, both a physical thing and a thing that is made of experience? And why should there be this extra, inessential thing: experience?
Chalmers is asking: How are these two stuffs, one of which is physical stuff, brains, or electricity, or information processing (such as what goes on inside computers), and the other of which is experience stuffwhich are differentalso the same, in that they are in the same place and happen at the same time?
Why Chalmers Misidentifies the Hard Problem
Chalmers identification of the hard problem derives from his mischaracterisation of experience.
(A separate, tangential point: the hard problem that he is trying to get at is only one of the hard problems, the other of which concerns the will.)
Chalmers asks how two non-identical stuffs are yet identified with one another, in that they are in the same place (and at the same time).
I think this is quite wrong. I think the hard problem is the following: How is some stuff that is in a different place from my brain (whatever I am perceiving, or thinking about) also in my brain? How are these different stuffs, the stuff that is my brain, and the stuff I am looking at (say the shed at the bottom of my garden I am looking at now) apparently in the same place, in my brain? How do I know the world? How is my brain about my shed? Or, if you dont believe that the brain is about the world, how do we account for this apparent aboutness?
Of course the shed cant be in the same place as my brain. The literal, physical, shed, cannot be in the same place as my brain. That is one fact that seems certain. And yet it seems to be. This perception that I am having, this thought, seems to be shed-like. There is something of the outside world, inside me, inside this brain. How can this be?
The problem Chalmers is addressing is: How is experience related to the physical? His framing of the question assumes that experience is a kind of stuff that overlays the brain. But this is a misunderstanding of the problem of experience. The problem of experience is this age-old problem, though it is expressed in a number of ways. How do I know the world? How can I, inside this brain, have access to the outside world? How are my thoughts about the world? What is the relationship of the subject to the object? How does a name mean what it means?
To reiterate, and to characterise the difference between what Chalmers identifies as the hard problem and what I think is the hard problem, in the baldest, and the simplest way:
Chalmers asks how can two different stuffs, physical stuff and experience stuff, be in the same place.
I ask how two different physical objects, my brain and the shed, can make one stuff: experience. How are these non-identical things, my brain and the shed, somehow forced together, like two north poles of two magnets, into one thing. They want to spring apart. The situation is not resolved. There seems to be a contradiction.
That is to say that I think the hard problem of consciousnessand indeed the hard problem that is at the basis of Chalmers hard problemis the problem of representation.
The Actual Hard Problem
What I identify above as the real hard problem is really only one half of the hard problem, or one version of it. That version is, in shorthand, How is the world in my brain? How is the world somehow in here, when it cant be in here?
The other version is the mirror image of it. How am I out there? How is my brain where the world is? How is it that I, this brain, reaches out, is spread out, to what I am looking at, to the world all around me? How is my perspective on the world, the appearance of the world to me, the two-dimensionality of objects, as they are to meidentified with the world itself, of matter, of things that are nothing to do with me? How is the me-like version of the world identified with the non-me-like version, the world itself? How is the surface of things, which is a plane, and which is my version of Reality, identified with a volume, which is the worlds version of Reality? How is the gossamer-thin surface of things identified with the substance of things? How is this, over here, this perspective that is centred on this brain, or this eye, identified with that, over there, out there? The objects of the world seem to be ranged around my brain in a circle, or rather, in a sphere, and I go right up to the outer surface of these objects; what I know is whatever there is up to the surface of those objects, but no further: whatever is beyond that surface, or inside it, is forever mysterious to me. That is my limit, my knowledge, or whatever it is that I sense. But how is this, this sphere, that is distinct from thie objects of the world, also identified with them? How is this perspective identified with the perspectiveless world? How is a view identified with something that isnt a view, that is just matter? Or the problem can be put like this: How do I know these objects, in that I perceive them, in that I can touch them, or touch them with my eyesand also do not know them, in that what they really are is the substance that is behind the appearance? Or the problem can be put like this: How is the appearance of things to me quite different from the appearance of things to youthey are non-identical, as non-identical as the two different points from which the world is viewedand yet each is identified with one and the same thing, the world? How is the greenness of that leaf, not the electromagnetic waves, but the phenomenological stuff, the stuff associated with meout there, identified with colourless matter?
There isnt, in addition to the world (every object that is not the object that is my brain), and in addition to my brain, a third thing, a stuff, that is wrapped around the substances of the world, Appearance, identified with the world, but not the world itself. The question, the puzzle, is not how there is, in addition to substance, also appearance, surface, in the same place as substance. The question is, the puzzle is: how I do I reach right up to the substances of the world, when in fact I am distinct from the world?
This is the essence of the problem that Plato and Aristotle are addressing. Their version of Chalmers hard problem is: There seem to be these two things, appearance (forms, universals) in the same place as substance, and yet they are different things. They are asking: how is there subjectivity out there, in the world? Or, if it not a problem, for Aristotle, then it is just a statement of how things are: The world is made of things, and those things are a combination of substance and form. Plato and Aristotle take this version of the problem as central. We (our age, of which Chalmers is a prominent proponent) takes the mirror image of their question as central: there seem to be these two things, experience and brain, and they are in the same place and yet there are different things. Or, if you like, and this seems the basis of Chalmers solution, and he is like Aristotle in this: the world is made of many things, some of which are people, and these things are a combination of brains (or information-processing, or electricity and chemicals) and experience.
How the Actual Hard Problem is really not different from the Problem of Representation
The Actual Hard Problem has two halves: How is the world in my brain? And how is my brain out there in the world?
This question is really the same question of how there is representation. How is it that you can have two distinct things, say a picture, and what that picture is of, that yet have some sort of identity? How can one represent the other? What is it about a picture that enables it to represent that which it represents? How can one be represented by the other? How can that which is represented be picked out, identified, by something other than it? Imagine a painting, on canvas, of a horse. How does that painting reach out across air and space and take us to the horse? How does it point to the horse? How is it the case that if you travel to the painting, you also travel to the horse? How too is there something in a place other than the horse that somehow contains that horse? How is there a thing, quite other than the horse itself, that is also identified with the horse?
Compare this problem with the problem of how a word represents a thing in the world. Consider the word Escargot (which was the name of a famous racehorse). How does that word refer to the horse Escargot? How is the horse Escargot referred to by the word Escargot? This is a different problem for the following reason. If you look at the picture of the horse, whilst it is a different object from the horse itselfit is in a different place; it is made of canvas and pigmentthere is nevertheless something that might account for the identity. The two look the same. The horse has a head and a tail; the picture of the horse has a head and tail. The horse is brown. The picture of the horse is brown. The horse has four legs; the picture of the horse has four legs. They share a form, at least, though not a substance. But now look at the word Escargot and compare it to the horse Escargot. These two things seem to have nothing in common. You will look in vain amongst the letters, at the chemical constitution of the ink and of the paper pulp: you will find nothing of the horse Escargot, in that word. And yet the one Escargot does indeed seem to represent the other, Escargot. How is this possible? And how are these two different cases both seemingly examples of one and the same concept: Representation?
The problem with this account of representation is that it doesnt matter how identical two things are in form: this is not sufficient for Representation. Two identical twins are very similar, indeed far more similar than the canvas painting and the horse. Not only do they look the same, they are also made of the same kind of stuff (flesh and bones). And yet one twin is not the representation of the other.
Or what about this: a pinhole camera and a horse. There is an image of the horse inside the pinhole camera. Light comes into the aperture in the front of the camera and terminates on the screen of the pinhole camera. The image of the horse represents the horse, and the horse is represented by the image inside the pinhole camera. These two things, the screen inside the camera, made of paper, and a horse-shaped pattern of lightand the horse, are distinct from one another, two separate things, and yet there is an identity, of sorts between them. How is this possible? Well, the image on the screen of the camera is caused by the horse. Light, emitted by the horse travels through the air and impresses itself on the screen. One and the same light is both initially identified with the horse, and then finally with the camera. There is a certain stuff, light, that is both identified with the horse and with the camera. Thus there are two things, two non-identical things, and a third thing, the light, that is identified with both. Thus representation is possible.
The problem with this account of representation is that being the effect of a cause doesnt make the one a representation of the other. A stone heats up in the sun. The warmth of the stone might have been caused by the sun but it is not a representation of the sun. You might claim it is, but first you would have to stretch the definition of Representation so widely that it incorporates all instances of causation. And secondly you would either have to rule out the case of words representing things, or, alternatively, you would have to trace a very tortuous and elaborate chain of causation from the thing to the word.
Compare these cases to the case of the brain representing some object in the world (an object that is not the brain). This seems to be a case like the painting of the horse or like the pinhole camera image of the horse. If you inspect the word Escargot you will find nothing of the horse Escargot in it. If you inspect the brain however, you will find something of the object that that brain is perceiving (say). If I am looking at a horse there is an image of that horse on my retina, and, more than that, there is a correlate of that image in the electrical or chemical impulses that transmit this image to the visual part of the brain, and there, in the visual part of the brain, there is a correlate to those impulses. Indeedthough it doesnt look like the image on the retina, nor indeed like the horseit is a sort of picture of the horse. This sort of picture of the horse in the brain (though written a language opaque to us) is caused by the horse (through a chain of causation that passes from the horse, to the eye, to the brain) and it also has some formal identity with a horse: there is a something in the brain that correlates to the head of the horse, its tail, its four legs, its brownness, etc.). These perceptions, visual, aural and all the rest, are the basis of the contents of the mind. These are chopped up, reassembled in different ways, etc., filtered, processed, categorised, etc.. But the model is really an Empiricist one, a Lockean or Humean one, of things in the world writing on the tabula of the brain, or impressing themselves on the soft tissue of the brain.
All these accounts of representation, the painting, the pinhole camera and the brain, are wrong. They fundamentally misunderstand representation. They are wrong because they fail to account for how a word represents.
What is absolutely required for representation is that there is, as well as identity between that which represents and that which is represented (otherwise there is no link between the things) non-identity.
A thing cannot represent itself. Nothing represents itself. In fact anythingexcept itselfin the entire universe, can represent a thingthere are no other restrictions whatsoever. Any supposed counterexample doesnt work. Examples you might see in the philosophical literature in fact, clandestinely, split upand must split upthat which is supposedly one thing that represents itself into two things. A critical factor in how the painting of the horse represents the horse, is that the horse is one thing, a thing in one place, and the painting is another thing, in another place. What enables the pinhole camera to represent the horse is that the pinhole camera is not the horse. What enables the brain to peceive the horse, indeed think about the horse, know the horse, is that the brain is a different lump of matter from the lump of matter that is the horse. In order that I know something I must be separate from that thing. Knowledge is a relationship, a relationship between a minimum of two things. What enables me to know the world (or rather to know everything that is not me, the knower) is that I am separate from the world. The world cant know the world, because the world is the world. The world cannot represent the world because the world is the world. There may well be something within my skull wall that has some identity of some kind with the horse (an identity of form or an effect of which the horse is caused, or both) but what is also critical is that there is something that is entirely separate from the horse, and indeed entirely separate from whatever is inside my skull wall that has an identity with the horse, the image on my retina, or the electricity in my visual cortex.
That I perceive the world, know the world, is that there is both some identity between me and the world, and some non-identity. Indeed that I perceive or know anything at all is that there must be both this identity and non-idenity. That therefore I introspect, that I have knowledge, not of the world, but of my experience, that I may access my experience or report on my experience (in Chalmers words) is that there is both some identity between that which knows and that which is known (and this condition is satisfied in that both of these are me, are inside my skull)and also some non-identity. There must be a part of my brain that is not my experience, that looks at my experience, that accesses and that reports. That is why I divide myself into my experience and my brain. Another version of this division is my body or outer half, my senses, and then my inner half, my brain. Another version is a homunculus inside my brain. Another is a pineal gland inside my brain. Another is the global workplace inside the brain.
How Representation is Impossible
But all of the foregoing assumes that there is such a thing as Representation, that Representation is possible. That there is a me, in the centre of the world, registering the world, representing the world, that inside those other skulls (that belong to my family and friends, and the people I see on the street) there are representations of the world.
That looking out into the garden, as I do now, that there is something that is doing the looking, in addition to what is being looked at. That there is a me in addition to the world.
That this greenery, those trees, that wall and that shed, that skyare inside my skull, and that there is something that they represent. That there is a world in addition to me.
That Reality is two things, me and the world.
That there is identity between those things, in that the one represents the other, and that there is non-identity between them too.
But none of this is possible. A thing cant be btoh identical to something else and also non-identical to it.
The Resolution of the Hard Problem
The actual hard problem, not the hard problem according to Chalmers, arises as the consequence of conceiving Reality to be two things, subject and object, Inner and Outer, me and the world, me in the world, Phenomenon and Thing-in-Itself (in Kantian terminology), Appearance and what appearance is of.
The resolution of the problem is very simple to state: it is a denial of the premises, a denial that Reality is dual in this way, a denial that Reality really is a division into me and the world, a recogntion that the Inner and the Outer are the same, that there is no world apart from me, that there is no me apart from the world, that the world is not independent of me, and that I am not independent of the world, that indeed, said long ago, that Atman is Brahman.
The resolution of the problem is very simple to state, but very hard to believe, very hard to trust in its truthfulness, very hard to imagine. This belief, that there is me and what is not me, is the foundation of all our thoughts about Reality. We cannot trust that it is true without also jettisoning everything we believe.
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