Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

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

Terrible analogy. Pain has many visible corrrelates such as wincing and other facial expressions, grunting, swearing or other noises, limping, jerking the affected area away from the cause of the pain. These are largely reflexive actions and they appear to be fairly universal.

The existence of these universally-shared pain-reflex actions does not prove that the underlying experience of the pain that causes them is also constant and universal. But this situation is a very long way from a "thing in a box that no one can see".

That may be Witt's point. In context, the beetle in the box has something to do with addressing the possibility of a private language. To Witt, if pain were a beetle in a box, talking about pain would be meaningless. So pain, in the language game, must be something else. NB I am not a Wittgenstein scholar nor do I play one on TV. I can email one though and see if he can remind me what the private language argument actually means.

From Russell's Problems of Philosophy, chapter 4, "Idealism":

The word 'idealism' is used by different philosophers in somewhat different senses. We shall understand by it the doctrine that whatever exists, or at any rate whatever can be known to exist, must be in some sense mental. This doctrine, which is very widely held among philosophers, has several forms, and is advocated on several different grounds. The doctrine is so widely held, and so interesting in itself, that even the briefest survey of philosophy must give some account of it.

There is no mention of materialism in the index.

i think we can suss out the hard problem of consciousness in a few hours if we just try really really hard

It's signal feedback.

lol crut

the more i read and think about this the harder the hard problem gets

which is comforting, somehow

Sometimes I forget what the actual problem is. Then I try to explain my position...

i think we can suss out the hard problem of consciousness in a few hours if we just try really really hard

Bedtime over here soon but go ahead, I'll check your working in the morning.

here goes: it is a very complex process involving a vast number of physical ingredients.

Ok do these o

Oops

Do these physical ingredients individually have intrinsic phenomenal qualities? Or do such qualities somehow arise when some level of complexity is reached? Or are there no such things as intrinsic phenomenal qualities? Or option d which is...
(Genuine non rhetorical q despite appearances. )

Could you elaborate on what exactly you mean by phenomenal qualities?

i was convinced by at the very least the debunking part of 'consciousness explained.'

Xp you know, good old qualia. The only thing we have direct experience of. I've linked to it before but I can't put my position re: physicalism better than this:
http://guidetoreality.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/quotes-on-key-mindbody-insight.html?m=1

I suppose I should read Dennett in a spirit of know your enemy but I can't get over how willing people are to deny their own direct experience.

dennett is a good read

xp

tbf philosophy has got a long tradition of considering the possibility of being mistaken about direct experience

I'd consider engaging NV et al about determinism as applied to individual actions in conscious organic beings but luckily enough I can choose to go and make coffee instead

or at least you think you can

philosophy has got a long tradition of considering the possibilty of many crazy things. which is fine, i'm a crazyist myself. more curious about the popularity of this opinion among lay people. although it's not as if philosophers have a monopoly on crazy.

OK I read your link ledge and I'm still struggling to apply meaning to the use of the word "intrinsic" there. Reason perhaps being that I'm not defining the result of the complicated process of constantly firing neurons that is consciousness as something distinct from the physical, if that's what you're saying (please be kind because I may have misread it entirely)? Same way with a computer I wouldn't confuse a functioning operating system as a distinct force from the physical pieces that make up the hardware. Am I way off?

no i agree that emergent behaviour isn't distinct from the physical. i'm talking about the 'what it is like', the felt nature of consciousness. maybe 'intrinsic' is misleading or needlessly obscure, but i guess it comes from the idea we know what consciousness feels like from the inside, and it's this feeling that isn't captured by the physicalist picture. physical systems, including complex emergent ones, are fully explicable from the outside, consciousness isn't - cf. nagel's 'what is it like to be a bat', frank jackson's 'mary the colour scientist' (i know he changed his mind but i didn't :)

the hard problem is actually figuring out why some people don't think there's a hard problem.

It seems to me that this all just comes down to technological limits in our ability to measure these things, no? The mystery is the process but not the origins as far as I can tell. How qualia is defined is still kind of vague to me.

how do we measure red? red is not a wavelength or a neurotransmitter or an action potential, it is a sensation, intimately and mysteriously bound up with those other things but nonetheless qualitatively entirely different.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness

i think that's a decent summary of David Chalmers' setting the question, don't know if it'll make the problem clearer

xp and different too from a system of neurons, no matter how vastly complex. emergent systems are just behaviour emerging from behaviour, and it's never an extraordinary leap to see how they arise. sensation is not behaviour, or like anything else it supposedly emerges from.

good article, except for this bit :

Everything we know about the universe tells us that reality consists only of physical things: atoms and their component particles, busily colliding and combining.

everything we know about the universe if you ignore all the direct evidence from your senses, sure!

different kind of "knowing" is intended i think.

it's not a perfect article, the speculation on imminent solutions to the hard problem or the claims about "advances" in AI are highly debatable. but it sets out the problem pretty well.

or maybe even saying that consciousness(es) aren't part of the universe in an additive sense

Time is a key to this discussion of what is consciousness. I think you would have a hard time finding many people willing to say a rock is conscious and that is because a rock will not change form for millions and possibly billions of years. A living thing, a conscious entity with a sensory experience, is the concerted effort of millions of cells, organs, bodily systems, microbes, electro-chemical processes, etc. If these systems/entities fail to work in harmony, the entire meta system fails, and the conscious entity presumably dies and loses their consciousness. Consciousness is an expression of a functional dynamic system, it is the underlying law/moral code followed on the micro level by the living entities in/on/of your body.

Maybe a more successful expression of consciousness is Peak Community Harmony, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", the same kind of selfless love religions preach about.

Consciousness must be sustained over time, and can outlast life-death cycles, at least on the micro level.

the hard problem is actually figuring out why some people don't think there's a hard problem

You appear to be using 'a problem' in the sense of 'a puzzle'. Consciousness is very puzzling. But mine seems to be functioning all on its own, so it hasn't been presenting me with any real difficulties in a practical sense.

no i agree that emergent behaviour isn't distinct from the physical. i'm talking about the 'what it is like', the felt nature of consciousness. maybe 'intrinsic' is misleading or needlessly obscure, but i guess it comes from the idea we know what consciousness feels like from the inside, and it's this feeling that isn't captured by the physicalist picture.

n each of them we can point to certain ligands (hormones, peptides), parts of the brain lighting up, etc. we can even treat certain affects pharmaceutically. but these physical profiles don't capture the intense /internal/ phenomenology of sadness

seems like a 'grains of sand on the beach' kind of question: we know there *is* an answer, but we can't count it exactly, and our ways of mapping and estimating it are always approximate. unless and until our technical command of time and space becomes a lot more god-like

how do we measure red? red is not a wavelength or a neurotransmitter or an action potential, it is a sensation, intimately and mysteriously bound up with those other things but nonetheless qualitatively entirely different.

― ledge, Thursday, April 9, 2015 12:00 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How is red not a particular reading of physical wavelengths the brain is programmed to interpret with physical tools (eyes, brain receptors in general). How is a sensation not just a word for the way the brain uses its tools to read physical information?

We're phenomenological probes that feel the need to expound on the phemomena we're recording. Like a thermometer that won't shut up about how the variations of temperature make it feel and that thinks it's special because not everything in the universe measures temperature in the exact same way it measures temperature, and, like, hey man, what if there are temperatures beyond what any of the thermometers are even capable of recording. But those musings have subjective value, which is all that really matters in the end.

ledge I feel your pain here

How is red not a particular reading of physical wavelengths the brain is programmed to interpret with physical tools (eyes, brain receptors in general). How is a sensation not just a word for the way the brain uses its tools to read physical information?

"Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? [4]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

Dennett also has a response to the "Mary the color scientist" thought experiment. He argues that Mary would not, in fact, learn something new if she stepped out of her black and white room to see the color red. Dennett asserts that if she already truly knew "everything about color", that knowledge would include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology causes us to sense the "quale" of color. Mary would therefore already know exactly what to expect of seeing red, before ever leaving the room. Dennett argues that the misleading aspect of the story is that Mary is supposed to not merely be knowledgeable about color but to actually know all the physical facts about it, which would be a knowledge so deep that it exceeds what can be imagined, and twists our intuitions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

She'll learn to associate an internal thinking process w/ an external body of knowledge but I don't know why that means seeing red requires a soul.

dunno who said anything about a soul? just arguing that subjective experience is fundamentally different than objective understanding, and not explained by the latter.

"that knowledge would include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology causes us to sense the "quale" of color. Mary would therefore already know exactly what to expect of seeing red ..."

The argument is specifically that qualia include information beyond the "why and how", at best this rebuttal was poorly summarized.

qualia, as such, are not really isolatable phenomena outside of the signifying (or informational, if you prefer) processes that produce them imo. my own wacky theory is that they are the entropy produced by the self-organizing processes of cognition (informational processing of an environment or "umwelt").

It's just that in the sense that learning can be as simple as a color or image hitting yr retina for the 1st time i don't know how that gives any insight into whether consciousness can be fully generated by determinative physical processes or whether there's a lacuna within which 'the mind' lives as a separate entity from the body?

sorry i used soul bc that's like my personal get-out-of-mind/body-question-free card, but obv you can believe in non-physically determined processes (like free will) w/out believing in divinity/souls. i mean obv ppl do. i don't really understand how.

Yeah fair to call that lacuna "soul" I guess. I'm probably not being fair to the other side here but it's frustrating when people don't share my intuition (right or wrong) - that qualia weirdly sit outside of our explanatory frameworks. It seems so basic!

that qualia weirdly sit outside of our explanatory frameworks.

see, this is why my "consciousness = entropy" theory is so brilliant.

We're phenomenological probes that feel the need to expound on the phemomena we're recording. Like a thermometer that won't shut up about how the variations of temperature make it feel and that thinks it's special because not everything in the universe measures temperature in the exact same way it measures temperature, and, like, hey man, what if there are temperatures beyond what any of the thermometers are even capable of recording. But those musings have subjective value, which is all that really matters in the end.

rings true. seems very fishy: theory that there must be something supernatural/superspecial/beyond physical/whatev about subjective experience of consciousness when that theory is being posited by minds which are an example of said consciousness.

obv you can believe in non-physically determined processes (like free will) w/out believing in divinity/souls. i mean obv ppl do. i don't really understand how

aiui we don't really have a firm grasp on what "causality" is, which leaves plenty of wriggle room

but the simpler answer is probly once again "because people feel as tho they have free will"

it would be weird if qualia and subjective experience of consciousness DIDN'T exist. how could the experience of seeing red or tasting something sour NOT produce a certain nebulous (to the being experiencing it) feeling/sensation? how could there ever be an objective reading of that subjective experience? how could it not seem mysterious, ultimately indescribable and possibly magical to the one experiencing it?

but these physical profiles don't capture the intense /internal/ phenomenology of sadness - which doesn't feel like peptides smashing into one of my brain receptors, but like my heart being torn in half.

how would we know what peptides smashing into one of your brain receptors "should" "feel" like? how would we know if our experience of sadness differs from the experience of peptides smashing into brain receptors? [not really directed to Mordy; think I'm agreeing with him]