Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

saying modeling and experiencing are synonymous is a million miles from e.g. saying liquidity and molecular motion are synonymous. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that we currently have *no idea* how that might work. it takes little insight to see it in the case of liquidity. it seems utterly inconceivable in the case of experience.

What constitutes a visual field? there's a lot of steps in visual processing and the "error" of seeing red could take place in any number of areas, any of which can be denied.

Introspectively, when you think about what it is to contemplate something, can you do it in such a way that you cannot also be said to be modeling that thing?

no, there is obviously correlation. it's a leap from that to causation (or identity).

what happens if there is spontaneous activity in my primary visual cortex such that i seem to see a patch of red? how is my experience mistaken?

It can be "mistaken" by further processing down the visual pipeline (or in another area of processing altogether) contradicting that, ultimately leading you to say "I saw blue" -- what is it you actually experienced then?

Putting it like that, what I experienced was the spontaneous fluctuation in my visual cortex, nothing more. So yes there will always be a physical correlation, but you can't say "you didn't see blue" - yes I did! It was right there in my (personal subjective private experiental) visual field!

Nah, we're pretty unreliable narrators in that regard.

Not if phrased "I remember seeing blue". How do you challenge that, exactly?

like if a light was red, and you drove past it, but you're utterly convinced of being a good, law-abiding citizen, you can resolve this by editing your master experiential narrative to having seen a yellow light.

oh sorry, i missed the step you were making from visual cortex producing red -> seeing blue, just thought you were changing colour terms for variety. also i erred saying primary visual cortex, i meant the last step in the visual pipeline (assuming for simplicity's sake that there is one).

so.

assuming there is spontaneous activity in v5, or whatever the final step in the colour processing chain is, which would correspond with seeing red in my visual field, then i will always see red. there can be no mistake there.

xposts.

well what do you consider the arbiter of what you, as a coherent identity, experienced? is it whatever controls speech? because I'd make the case that what we say (in internal monologues as well) would very likely contradict any number of activities that are actually going on in the brain.

as far as visual experience goes it is its own arbiter, i guess. yes there could be errors of speech or memory after the fact.

memory is a kind of conscious experience. so i can be sure *now* i'm seeing red, and be sure ten minutes later that i remember seeing yellow. but i shouldn't claim to be sure that i saw yellow. i don't think that's sophistry, not sure if it's useful.

if you allow that memory retrieval is equivalent to experience, why not modeling?

I'm not so sure there is anything you don't experience through memory. Even stuff you claim to be experiencing "now".

there are some interesting experiments w/r/t very short term memory which I think give a clue to the constraints of what's necessary for cognition. (the 5 +/- 2 thing etc...)

if you allow that memory retrieval is equivalent to experience, why not modeling?

I would distinguish between the subjective experience of memory retrieval and the brain mechanisms of memory retrieval. No different from the visual experience case.

let's try a different angle: if an entity is performing recognizable mechanisms of memory retrieval, would you allow that the entity is having a subjective experience?

Perhaps, perhaps. I'm basically a panpsychist u kno. Would you?

I'd say so, too, but if we accept that, why isn't that enough?

Because I don't know what it is like to be a bat. Or a bloody hard drive. Because Mary doesn't know what it's like to see red. Because phenomenal subjective experience is nothing like anything in physics. Because http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

I'd say you could know what it is like to be a bat insofar that the bat doesn't know what it's like to be a bat either, so you're both on equal bat-ground.

I mean going back to the entity question, if it's performing a recognizable memory retrieval mechanism, the fact that it is recognizable means you are performing an analogous retrieval yourself, so you are more or less experiencing the same thing.

A feedback loop signifying self-awareness?

I dunno. y'all could just be thinking about peanut butter.

I mean going back to the entity question, if it's performing a recognizable memory retrieval mechanism, the fact that it is recognizable means you are performing an analogous retrieval yourself, so you are more or less experiencing the same thing.

So I can only know (questionable even whether this analogically reasoning is enough for knowledge) what it is like to experience something I have already experienced? That's the point of Mary the colourblind neuroscientist. Scientific knowledge alone is insufficient or incomplete.

Feedback, models, complexity, none of these bridge the gap.

You can have false memories so you don't have to have first-hand experience of something.

A false memory is a first-hand experience!

The Mary problem is particularly weird and egregious in that in her scenario, she's probably the only person in the world who actually knows what the experience of "red" is like for anyone else.

The premise is Mary has been gifted with supernatural knowledge (i.e. implanted with false memories)

She knows no such thing! Aargh! WHY CAN'T YOU SEE THE ELEPHANT?!

xp

food writing is generally pretty bad, but a sufficiently gifted food writer could describe a novel food you have never eaten before and you would be able to recognize it upon eating it (because in a sense you have already eaten it)

In what sense?

I mean going back to the entity question, if it's performing a recognizable memory retrieval mechanism, the fact that it is recognizable means you are performing an analogous retrieval yourself, so you are more or less experiencing the same thing.

Wait, you're begging the question here. Whether you are experiencing the same thing when the same recognisable mechanisms are operating is entirely the point in question

If you don't accept that you are both experiencing the same thing, then there's no basis to say that you can experience anything "red" because red is a referent to an experience performed by an entity that is different from you in the present.

No it isn't. Unless you're talking about my prior self as a distinct entity. (Are you?) Otherwise the referent of "red" is my own prior redness experience.

If you're claiming that my experience of red is necessarily the same as, say, yours on pain of meaninglessness then you're again begging the q.

Yes your prior self is a distinct entity that ought not be afforded privilege over a stranger provided the recognition is there

It has inherent privilege over a stranger in that both of us share the same referent for red. The memories of the referent may be unreliable or faulty, but it's possible to hypothesise an instance where they are reliable and accurate.

There is no similar instance than can be posited between us and the other non-us agents that don't have access to that referential experience at any time, even hypothetically.

Why not? you are as much a stranger to yourself as you are to someone else, given sufficient time.

The ship of Theseus might have all new wood, but it still isn't the Titanic

Same shit different boat

293. If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word “pain” means a must I not say that of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Well, everyone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! —– Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. a Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have some- thing different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing con- stantly changing. a But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless? a If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. a No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

— Uncle Ludwig, PI

whoops, graf continues:

That is to say, if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and name’, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.

Let's all go read PI and then reconvene, I've been meaning to do that for a few years here…

I will if you tell me:

what he means by "drops out of consideration as irrelevant"
his intended level of irony
what we are to take from this passage

Dude it's Wittgenstein, figuring out what he means is the whole game.

hahah ok

i guess what i take from that is: "we all in practice act as if we know what pain is, so stop theorizing about private unsharable experiences"

i think we are entering a realm where we no longer have to theorize because the private unsharable experiences are becoming less private and more sharable, to the point where we can reasonably say lobsters feel pain so we should probably stop cooking them that way.

I was going to say, I think the way we experience pain is highly socialized behavior.