Using Dennett's definition of qualia, how is it possible

>>9347501
I like Ed Witten's line on this. We can understand the brain in as much as we can understand the computation it does, but we'll never understand why we can "see" that computation.

God, I forgot how fucking retarded Dennett is. Holy fucking shit these analytic pseudo-philosophers are just unbelievably bad at thinking. Not only is he rehashing the same questions already encountered when this dialogue BEGAN in earnest in the 19th century, he's giving retard tier answers to them and futzing them all up.

It's amazing. He's super famous and self-important, sells 50 books a day that are just puffed-up sophomoric 2nd year philosophy essays. All of his positions are the things that you learn in first year philosophy AS the retarded strawman positions no one actually holds because they can be instantly deflated by an iota of subtlety. Who know that "First Year Strawman Mistakes" are the key to selling 10,000,000 books?

>>9347588
but, anon, intuition pumps are really useful!
;)

This is fucking stupid

>>9347588

>not a single argument, just sperging out hard

Analytic philosophy is the new continental philosophy on /lit/. Lots of sperg tier rage directed at it with no real substance or accuracy of what it is really about.

File: pope smiles.jpg (48KB, 500x353px) Image search: [Google]

48KB, 500x353px

But you see, Anon, we CAN'T have a soul, because then that soul would have to come from somewhere, and that would imply a Creator, and we can't have that.

;)

>>9347730
>not a single argument

Post some content or kill yourself.

>According to the discipline that only studies phenomena in the physical world, there is nothing outside the physical world.
wow fucken shocker

>>9347739

>person 1: "x is a retard, x is bad at thinking. x is rehashing. x is y. x is z. No argument or supporting reasons as to why this is the case. "
>person 2: "person 1's post isn't very good from an argumentative standpoint"
>person 3: "person 2, dude, post some content, kys, smoke weed lmao"

You are the reason why this place sucks. You defend morons like the above anon whose post amounts to, "waaaaah this is bad."

>>9347746
>OP spends his entire life studying gay sex
>"wow there must be outside of gay sex"

>>9347752
Maybe instead of writing unfunny, uninteresting posts about posts about posts about how posts don't have any content, you could post some content.

>>9347501

try sartre bitch lol

File: rarestirner.png (24KB, 450x500px) Image search: [Google]

24KB, 450x500px

>>9347767
Qualia is the modern spooky big daddy, the ruler in the domain of contemporary philosophical tautology. Much like God, its definition precludes deductive or inductive proofs of it. It is a dogma

>>9347793

If you were actually concerned about content, you would have critiqued the original post I was responding to, since it lacks any substantive content that can't be reduced to whining. It adds nothing to the thread that can't be reduced to, "Dennett is badman." Instead, I'm guessing you are the original poster, and you are massively butthurt about not being able to defend your point so you resort to empty, fat-kantbot platitudes about this or that being content with no actual supporting reasons. I'm seeing a pattern here, of the pseud, "I'm unable to actually argue" kind.

>>9347588
Dennett is responding to analytic philosophers who believe that qualia is a distinct ontological category. Why do you paint analytics with such a broad stroke?

File: 1463899534645[1].jpg (49KB, 677x771px) Image search: [Google]

49KB, 677x771px

>>9347813
Qualia is merely another name attempting to describe the creative nothingness, and to presuppose its existence beyond the Ego has been the greatest failure and the greatest curse on human dialectic.

>>9347813
Qualia isn't a dogma, it's just a word referring to things like "redness" or "loudness", which obviously exist in some sense. People who talk about qualia aren't suggesting that qualia are some separate, reified things.

>>9347984
Doesn't Dennett claim that qualia don't exist? Is that different from claiming they're not a distinct ontological category?

>>9348093
>>Qualia isn't a dogma, it's just a word referring to things like "redness" or "loudness", which obviously exist in some sense
substantives only exist in the fantasy of a few rationalists

>>9347501
>Science tells us
stopped reading here

>>9347588
I think Dennett has some deep flaws.
This comment really doesn't seem like you've read anything he's written though.

>>9348093
Why obvious?

>>9348274
Dennett's not really about "doesn't exist". He thinks it's irresponsible reductionism.

He posits largely that qualia has no claim to a collection of phenomena that describe consciousness in any functional way.

Rather that the ways in which people try to construct qualia always arbitrarily links together entirely different phenomena, that is unlikely to have the centralised cause that categorising it in such a way implies.

At least that's my understanding.

He could be making an even stronger point.

>>9347730
Agree.

>>9347567

Why WHO can see it?

>>9347732

It would not imply that at all. Rather, not exclusively. Any number of alternate theories could be made to souls origin, and in fact, it could be uncreated.

>>9347813

Then there is no proof anything at all exists. Thanks for demonstrating why stirner is mentally retarded.

>>9348352
>Thanks for demonstrating why stirner is mentally retarded.

Clearly that post reflects Stiners thought after all its not like some random anon could post bullshit with a picture of him

>>9348334
Humans. The conjecture is that we'll never understand why the computation the brain does gives rise to subjective experience, even though we'll probably be able understand the computation the brain does and how it does it.

>>9348380

>computations in the brain

what the fuck are you even talking about?

>subjective experience

what the fuck are you talking about? experiences are absolutely objective. the sensation of 'green' is precisely what it is and not subject to interpretation as other than green according to a substantive precept. just as pain is indeed pain and nothing else, experiences are by definition objective events, if this were not so we could be self aware, as there would be no consistent stream of consciousness which could learn to know itself. it would be awareness without knowledge of awareness such as the lower animals experience.

>>9348535
>pain is indeed pain and nothing else
>A=A
do you have a non-circular definition for pain?

>>9348298
I read 6 of his books as a teenager before I started reading actual philosophy.

Is it some badge of honour to read 140-page phony pop philosophy? He basically publishes his undergraduate think pieces.

Quine was at least a real philosopher. He mostly sucked ass too but at least he did real philosophy.

>>9348347
>It would not imply that at all.
It would imply a potential for all souls in the beginning. Perhaps even in something authentic.

>>9348563

A is in fact A.

'circular' is one way of saying 'axiom', i suppose.

are you actually questioning the concept of identity?

>>9348594
>It would imply a potential for all souls in the beginning. Perhaps even in something authentic.

i haven't the faintest clue what this means.

Does analytic philosophy care about anything other than epistemology?
The entire tradition is like centuries worth of tl;dr

>>9348587

This. I read idiot Dennett when I was 6 years old. I read everything of his, and every one of his idiot footnotes. He was an idiot then and an idiot now. He's an idiot. You'd have to be an imbecile to read idiot Dennett.

>>9348697
Analytic "philosophy" doesn't care about epistemology. They're 200+ years behind on philosophy of mind.

>>9348734

oh yes, 200 years behind.

because we've really achieved a high level of understanding in our society about how the mind and self and consciousness work, as evidenced by the immense virtue displayed by our citizens, the low rates of mental illness and mental weakness, and the high amount of people who are really personally powerful in a way that shows they understand themselves and how their own mind works.

that was sarcasm, obviously, today most people know far less about mind than people did in the past. we're regressing in that regard.

>>9347567
Uhhhhh nigger Chalmers has been talking about this for like 40 years you fucking retard

Why are all reductive Materialists so consistently boring on top of being consistently wrong? It's like their entire dialectic is comprised of the same prepackaged words clusters and chains of ideas.

>>9347501
>Therefore, what is the essential difference between both? The perspective. It will never be possible to literally put yourself in the place of other
Nigger has never heard of blindsight; formerly sighted individuals lose some vision because of cortical brain damage, but are still able to detect movement in their blind spot. They feel like they're just guessing which direction an object has moved in, but are remarkably accurate. This shows that you can have a partial absence of qualia of the same sense in the same person, at the same time.
Likewise cortically deaf people will, in some cases, reflexively orient their heads towards sudden, loud sounds, even though they can't consciously hear anything.

>>9347501
>it is only an aid for the articulation of responses to the input.
It's not even an aid, it's just the most superfluous thing there is to the processes of the human-machine.

>>9348535
>experiences are absolutely objective. the sensation of 'green' is precisely what it is and not subject to interpretation as other than green according to a substantive precept
I don't think he meant 'subjective' in the sense of 'subject to interpretation.'

>>9349736
I can't see how what you wrote deny anything from what you quoted. Isn't OP's text basically saying that qualia isn't needed to the events of input-processing-output? Even though the last sentence I quoted seems to contradict what he was trying to say, idk.

>>9350077
>it's just
You just reduce something from {what it is} to {what you want it to be so that you can ignore it}.

>>9350134
What? I don't ignore that there's subjectivity.
Besides, I think you meant:
>You just reduced something from {what I think it is} to {what you think it is}

The interaction problem disproves qualia.

>>9351171
It doesn't. It only shows that there's no causal relation between qualia and physical things, we still can have a parallelism.

>>9351222
No we can't. If there is no interaction, then every claim of qualia is invalid.

>>9351258
Why?

>>9351286
Because if you hold that claims of qualia are valid even though they aren't contingent on the existence of qualia, then, going by the same logic, you can make ANY claim valid.

>>9351305
First, I can't see how one can deny the fact that he has first person experience (and is there any other experience?), so I really can't make sense of 'Qualia aren't real.' Probably there's some semantic misunderstanding underlying their denial.
What you're saying is that qualia can't be proved, and I agree. But I don't believe only in what can be proved, I also believe in what I experience directly and that is... experience itself with its qualia. Are you denying that you're an 'I', a 'first person'?

>>9351353
The interaction problem means that something cannot be "selectively" uncertain. It's either uncertain to everybody, or uncertain to nobody. Information cannot play favorites.

>>9351392
>Information cannot play favorites.
Why? I think you're mixing 'information' in the sense of something experienced or thought, and 'information' in the sense of a scientific fact.

>>9351419
If we took a philosophical zombie and isolated the causal chain of actions that leads to it claiming to have qualia, then tested other people for that causal chain, it could be determined which people are philosophical zombies. If your cause of claiming to experience qualia is determined to be not BE qualia, then you can't have qualia because something caused by one thing can't simultaneously be caused by another thing.

>>9351436
>to be not BE
What did you mean?
I don't believe there can be any way of checking if people are p-zombies or not, as I deny that there can be any causal link between qualia and physical things. I know I'm not a p-zombie, however... I could still be one and deny it, as my physical act of writing this is determined solely by physical events. The problem is: you can't deny to yourself that you have a first person perspective (well, I believe you're not a p-zombie...). As for the use of qualia in science, I believe they're completely unnecessary, superfluous, dispensable.

>>9351507
>you can't deny to yourself that you have a first person perspective
But you've already claimed that there is no connection between the physical(act of denying) and qualia.

>>9349585
I don't know why, but it's annoying. Typically a reductive materialist one speaks to online, if he doesn't know your ideas already, will begin by assuming that if you think there is a hard problem of consciousness, you must be a Christcuck... they have their mental framework all set up to shoot down religious arguments, which is fairly easy, and they have a hard time processing critiques of reductionism from the direction of the hard problem.

>>9349585
One almost can't help but wonder if they might be p-zombies.

>>9351569
Define "consciousness".

>>9351545
That's why I said 'to yourself.' What I was trying to say is that you can't have a subjective negation of subjectivity. Now, you could deny that there's such a thing as 'subjectivity,' but then I will have no idea of what I could say, as such a denial makes no sense to me: I would only continue to ask what you mean by what you say until I could understand it. Anyway, I don't believe that you believe yourself to be a p-zombie, and probably when you're denying qualia you're denying the practicality of the concept (and with this I agree).

>>9351614
But you're just presupposing that this "subjectivity" exists with no basis.

File: image.jpg (51KB, 600x450px) Image search: [Google]

51KB, 600x450px

Dan ignores rhodopsin, which ruins his pet theory.

Yeah, it's that fucking simple

>>9351654
I'm only presupposing if we use "presuppose' in a very wide sense. 'Subjectivity' is how I call the experience of 'firstpersonness', it's a given to me, it happens immediately to me, I don't need to 'suppose' it. But I can't force you to believe that I have such an experience, there's no way I can prove it: one can only be sure of one's own experience of it.

>>9351686
>firstpersonness
That's arbitrary though so it can't be used for any kind of formal statement.

>>9351699
Again, it's only arbitrary if we use 'arbitrary' in a very wide sense. I don't choose to have such an experience, so we can't call it 'arbitrary' in a strict sense. If it can be used or if it can't, will depend on the use you want to make: if it's only an introspective use, then it's valid; if it's a scientific use, then it's impossible.

>>9351724
>I don't choose to have such an experience
But you assume that you know what the experience is.

>>9351775
I only assume if we use 'assume' etc... how many times will I have to repeat phrases like this? It's a given, an immediate datum, I don't choose, I don't elaborate it, I don't conceptualise it and then 'presuppose,' it simply happens and is here before me. I can't prove it, you can only take it on faith in the same way I can only by faith believe that other people aren't p-zombies, and it happens instinctively, as I instinctively believe that such and such impressions are the appearance of a pencil. How can I 'assume' anything about an immediate experience? It is what it presents itself to be, and before it I can only be silent.

>>9351805
People wrongly attribute properties to things they experience all the time. This is no different. You don't have perfect knowledge of what it is.

>>9351810
But I'm not attributing anything, indeed there's nothing to attribute. I can attribute properties to something I know via sensations, but I can't do anything about sensations themselves.

>>9351822
But you already have. The word "qualia" as properties associated with it, and those properties are wrong.

>>9351840
Which properties and how are they wrong? I've not read Consciousness Explained as Dennett's ideas seemed pretty vague and based mostly on misunderstandings.

The problem with p-zombies seems to be the following.
>Scientists make models to approach reality
>it doesn't explain all of it
>therefore reality must be cut so that the model fits perfectly

>>9351863
The most problematic property is "passive". It is assumed that qualia produces no action, and this is obviously false because people talk about it, which is an action. Derived from this is the idea of being "private" i.e. the information of the experience cannot be transferred, which is also contradicted by the fact that it evidently produces actions, as the actions transfer information about it.

>>9351880
People talk about it, but it doesn't mean that the qualia are the 'causes.' First, the idea itself of causality is just a practical idea: if cause and effect are discontinuous, then they just happen to follow one another; if they are continuous, only arbitrarily can we call one the cause and another the effect. Now, qualia can't be continuous to people's actions, for the latter are physical and the former are just phenomenal. And if they aren't continuous, only pragmatically can we call them the 'cause' of such actions. About the incommunicability, I still hold that the immediate is incommunicable; we can only communicate mediate representations, i. e., concepts, and even then there's no way to check if it was absolutely communicated.

>>9351880
Now I'm leaving, we continue the discussion tomorrow.

>>9351911
This line of thought could be used to validate ANY idea, so you are showing an obvious bias by only applying it to qualia.

>>9351607
Subjectivity, interiority, the essence of why there's something that it's like to be you (to borrow from Nagel).
To be philosophically precise, there's actually no reason to assume that anything exists outside of consciousness (objective reality could still exist without an opposite pole to consciousness), so the above terms are somewhat misleading.

>>9352233
That really says nothing at all.

>>9352241

You see, hear, feel, and so on. Most people here would probably agree that a dog also sees, hears, feels, and so on. However, most people would probably agree that a rock doesn't. And when you are in deep sleep, you also don't. "Conscious" refers to that quality that is characteristic of the waking you and the dog but is not characteristic of the you in deep sleep or of the rock.

Nitpicking note: Again, to be precise I feel that I must mention that the above is a simplification - to be absolutely precise, one must admit that it is an arbitrary distinction to single out "you", "dog", or "rock" as material beings separated by clear boundaries from other material beings. Indeed, it might be the case that the only things that have a legitimate case for being discrete as opposed to continuous are consciousnesses (that's if there is more than one in the universe, which itself is not clear).

>>9352411
Cont...

I should add, I think, that when I say " that quality that is characteristic of the waking you and the dog but is not characteristic of the you in deep sleep or of the rock", I mean a quality that is not merely a material difference - some arrangement of chemicals, etc. - but rather, the actual fact that the waking you, for example, has subjective experience, but the you in deep sleep does not. Although, of course, the presence or absence of subjective experience is tightly correlated with material conditions (which chemicals are in the brain, etc.)

>>9352420
But it's not a characteristic of "you", it's a characteristic of the experiences.

>>9352420
But it's still bounded by physics and biology. We can argue about how the activity and arrangement of interacting neurons give rise to experience but to say that conscious experience goes beyond brain activity would be spitting in the face of all the work in neurosciences, tCMR, MRI, lesion studies, and conscious brain surgery that has occurred in the last 100 years. You would also be ignoring the improvement in A.I. and neural networks that led to self driving cars, Go playing, speech recognition, and so on.

>>9352424
I agree... it is difficult to precisely describe the issue using standard language. After all, we are not even sure whether it makes sense to consider anything to exist "outside" of consciousness.

>>9352451
> We can argue about how the activity and arrangement of interacting neurons give rise to experience but to say that conscious experience goes beyond brain activity would be spitting in the face of all the work in...
Not at all. It doesn't matter how precisely the material correlates of consciousness are described my science - the essential mystery of the connection between the material and subjective experience remains. This mystery has not been clarified to even the slightest degree by all of the advancement in material science. Even if material science reached a point at which it was possible to artificially construct arrangements of matter that seemed every bit as conscious as humans (and even if they were every bit as conscious as humans), if material science never explained how the material arrangement gives rise to subjective experience, the mystery would remain as untouched as it is now.

>>9347588
>God, I forgot how fucking retarded Dennett is.
He has a phd from Oxford and a degree from Harvard and has received TWO Guggenheim Fellowships.
You are some fucktard who masturbates to futa porn

>>9352451
To put it in plainer words, even if we learned how to literally build conscious machines, unless we somehow figured out how their material arrangement gave rise to subjective experience, the hard problem of consciousness would remain completely untouched by this scientific progress. This is in no way, shape or form an insult to science. On the contrary, it would be an insult to science to claim, without good reason for so claiming, that physicalist science is capable of explaining all things.

>>9352499
Dennett has avoided the hard problem for years He even wrote a book called Consciousness Explained that doesn't explain consciousness in the slightest. I'd say this opens him up to a bit of light-hearted mockery.

>>9352509
I like to joke that he should have titled the book "Consciousness Hand-Waved Away".

>when "philosophers" and ""scientists"" try to explain qualia, something that is, by definition, ineffable

haven't we learned anything? "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"

>>9352502
Then it's not actually a problem, just like "why does the electromagnetic force exist" is not a problem.

>>9352525
If hard-core physicalists admitted that they have no answer for the hard problem other than to postulate consciousness as something that just "is" in the universe, in the same way that the electromagnetic force just "is", I would not criticize them at all. I agree. It is the dogmatic reductionists, the people who insist that consciousness must be reducible to material phenomena which cause it, who I find annoying.

>>9352525
Cont... And I find the people who claim that there is no such thing as consciousness to be even more annoying. Unless they are p-zombies, I guess, in which case it makes sense.

>>9352490
Well now you're entering the realm of epistemology. What is knowledge? How would we ever know if we found a representation that accurately describe subjective experience?
You're taking the philosopher's approach that is binding everything to language. The engineer's approach is to build a fully human a.i. that can self recognize and learn from experience. Right now the engineers have achieved the learning from experience aspect. It is only a matter of time to reach self recognition.

I disagree with you on saying no advancement has been made. We all know about trans cranial magnetic resonance and how they can enhance our subjectivity, not to mention psychedelics and meditation. There's also head concussions study on boxers that gets hit in the head, go on fighting for another round and have no recollection on what they previous experience while they were in the fight. Theses studies provide very valuable clues to our goal of accurately describing consciousness. And to say material science will never explain the phenomena of "qualia" or subjective experience (if philosophers will ever agree to pinpoint it to a phenomenon) is rather pointless since what else will? Whatever you try to do, you'll be bounded in language.

>>9352549
Scientists and engineers want to elicit the principles that makes up the phenomena of consciousness because that want to reproduce it in a machine, basically transitioning between carbon and silicon. If we take consciousness as is and not try to reduce it to a general set of principles than there will never be a fully general artificial intelligence agent. There is no reason not to try since we already have success in transferring some aspect of learning capability to machines in the form of neural networks.

>>9352560

>You're taking the philosopher's approach that is binding everything to language.

Not one bit. I use words, of course, to communicate (perhaps not very skillfully)... but I am actually talking about something rather simple (although mysterious).

I can imagine an extremely intelligent being, capable of advanced problem-solving, that is not conscious. There is nothing I can think of that would make such a being impossible.

But it seems that humans are intelligent beings that ARE conscious. Humans have subjective experience - I think only utter hand-waving reductionists would deny that. So then I ask: does matter give rise to this subjective experience? It certainly seems so... after all, consciousness is very well correlated with the states of matter. Taking drugs affects my consciousness, being tired affects it, and so on... so it seems that matter certainly strongly affects consciousness. Ok, then it should be a simple matter to explain the mechanism by which matter gives rise to consciousness, right? Whoops, no. It turns out that no-one (to my knowledge) has ever been able to even put one tiny little dent in the question of what this mechanism is. It is an utter mystery.

> disagree with you on saying no advancement has been made ...

There has been tremendous advancement in figuring out how changes in matter affect consciousness. There has been tremendous advancement in figuring out how changes in matter affect intelligence, thinking, problem solving, memory, etc. But there has been zero advancement in figuring out how matter gives rise to consciousness (if it does).

>>9352577
Why would it not be possible to create a hyper-intelligent machine that is not conscious? I see no reason to believe that consciousness must be present for a being to be capable of extremely advanced problem-solving. A chess computer, presumably, has no subjective experience - yet it can beat humans. I can extrapolate from this by a factor of millions and billions and imagine a machine that is actually better at general problem-solving and pattern analysis than humans, yet has no subjective experience.

>>9352549
But the problem is that it's called a problem in the first place.

>>9352588
I myself prefer to call it a "mystery". The term "hard problem of consciousness" was invented, it seems, by Chalmers... and keep in mind that he had (and has) people arguing against him who are dogmatically convinced that it's just a matter of time before neuroscience, etc. explains everything there is to know about subjectivity. Calling it a "problem" makes sense in that context because it contrasts the issue against the arguments of people who claim that there is no issue at all.

>>9352578
>Ok, then it should be a simple matter to explain the mechanism by which matter gives rise to consciousness,

It should be simple if people would define what they mean. Neuroscientists would simply say brain activity. Like how they decide when to pull the plug on a coma patient. But philosophers can't seem to agree on this definition or provide one of their own that can be found outside of language.

>But there has been zero advancement in figuring out how matter gives rise to consciousness (if it does).
Why don't you try? Maybe you'll win a nobel prize.
But I disagree. Libet's experiment shows us that unconscious activity affects conscious acts. It could be an interaction of a bunch of different systems within our brain that individually are predictable but overall is unpredictable. Consciousness could be a meta system that governs the interactions between all these different lower neural systems. From goal recognition and generation, memory recollection, pattern recognition, language processing, self recognition, emotion, and so on.

>>9352606
Again, nobody would call "why is there electromagnetism" a problem, and they likely wouldn't call it a mystery either.

>>9352621

>It should be simple if people would define what they mean. Neuroscientists would simply say brain activity. Like how they decide when to pull the plug on a coma patient. But philosophers can't seem to agree on this definition or provide one of their own that can be found outside of language.

Consciousness = subjective experience. I don't really understand why this needs to be explained. Don't you have subjective experience? When you are awake there are colors, smells, pain, etc. When you are in deep sleep, none of it. I can imagine an advanced machine that is just as good at problem solving and pattern analysis as you are, but which never experiences colors, smells, pain, or anything at all. Such a machine would lack something that you don't lack (assuming that you're not a p-zombie). What it would lack is consciousness.

>Why don't you try?

I have tried, and will continue to. The issue seems to be as intractable to physicalist analyses as philosophical questions like "why is there anything rather than nothing". But it is fascinating.

>It could be an interaction of a bunch of different systems within our brain that individually are predictable but overall is unpredictable. Consciousness could be a meta system that governs the interactions between all these different lower neural systems. From goal recognition and generation, memory recollection, pattern recognition, language processing, self recognition, emotion, and so on.

This is all hand-waving. There is, in it, not even the hint of a potential empirically-observable *mechanism* that would connect the material to the subjective.

>>9352584
I agree with you that intelligence does not necessarily require consciousness. If you ask a smart person why they are so smart, they won't be able to explain it. Besides evolution is itself intelligent since it's able to produce human beings, the aids virus, the immune system, dinosaurs and a billion other things unconsciously.

Why would we want to develop consciousnesses in a machine? The answer is why not?

>>9352638
>subjective experience
This term isn't anywhere near as clear as you think it is.

>>9352626

>Again, nobody would call "why is there electromagnetism" a problem, and they likely wouldn't call it a mystery either.

I doubt that you're right. My guess is that many scientists working in physics are very interested in the question of why there is electromagnetism... interested to the point that calling the issue a "problem" or "mystery" would make sense.

>>9352645
Well yeah, that's why I wrote the rest of the paragraph.

>>9352650
There's also a problem with using the label "subjective experience" for it; the term makes assumptions about the thing that may not be true.

>>9352638
>When you are awake there are colors, smells, pain, etc. When you are in deep sleep, none of it.
By you're definition google self driving cars have subjective experience. Do they not detect and see other cars while driving? Do they not process the information that goes into their sensors? Do they not turn off when you take out the keys? The only thing that google lacks is self recognition, being able to differentiate itself from other things, and having a language processing system that can describe it's internal activity to you linguistically.

>connect the material to the subjective
If you want to take it that far than you'll be pursuing the Buddhist line of thought on the concept of no self. That is subjectivity really is sort of an illusion. "I, me, myself," are things we say but don't necessarily exists permanently. That's a different can of worms that you'll have to also open if you want to pursue this argument on subjective experience.

>>9352668

>By you're definition google self driving cars have subjective experience.

No, because presumably google self driving cars don't actually experience anything... there is electricity going through circuits in various complex patterns in them, but not, for example, pain as a felt thing.

>>9352666
>There's also a problem with using the label "subjective experience" for it; the term makes assumptions about the thing that may not be true.
>>9352668
>If you want to take it that far than you'll be pursuing the Buddhist line of thought on the concept of no self. That is subjectivity really is sort of an illusion. "I, me, myself," are things we say but don't necessarily exists permanently. That's a different can of worms that you'll have to also open if you want to pursue this argument on subjective experience.

Sure... there are many interesting associated questions. For now I'm just critiquing the extreme physicalist view that there is no consciousness, or that it will inevitably be explained by the advance of neuroscience, etc.

>>9352680
>the extreme physicalist view that there is no consciousness
What? No. Most scientist agree consciousness exist. Hell they'll even say that dogs, dolphins, pigs, cows, and any organism with a brain like structure has consciousness.

>that it will inevitably be explained by the advance of neurosciences
As oppose to being explain by nothing but language, empty words with no repercussions no practical use? Or not explaining it at all.

>>9352679
Same thing can be said about the human brain. Experience is seen as a gradient. I say google car do experience on a lower level. It can adapt and learn from it's interactions which is practical experience.

>>9352451
Someone should note that consciousness in this context is not the same as self-awareness. Consciousness is the "subjective experience" (a bit of a misnomer IMO), the ability to feel pain as pain and colour as colour, not just as information. Self-awareness is just knowing that you exist, which is something that can be programmed into any AI.


>>9352621
>It should be simple if people would define what they mean. Neuroscientists would simply say brain activity. Like how they decide when to pull the plug on a coma patient. But philosophers can't seem to agree on this definition or provide one of their own that can be found outside of language.
They can't define it because it's not a physical phenomena, but it's not hard to tell what they're talking about since, in theory, it's a trait that every human has. If p-zombies were to exist, then it's possible they might not even grasp the concept.

>>9352701
No, it's not a gradient. Either the car has subjective experience or it doesn't. It's binary. Even the slightest shred of subjective experience would qualify the car as having consciousness. I claim that the car probably has zero subjective experience.

>>9352730
>the ability to feel pain as pain and colour as colour, not just as information.
Then dogs, dolphins, reptile, and organisms with a brain have consciousness and subjective experience.
Besides people know what pain is, physical reaction that concentrate focus to one particular area to keep that area from being damage. Pain can be controlled by anesthesia, and electroshock. Color on the other hand is related to categorization and differentiation. To say color is color is pointless. It is a feature that is used in relation to other objects, places, memories, and so on.

> not a physical phenomena
Then there's no point in discussion. You say it's not physical but then you go on using language. Whatever you do you can't seem to escape language which is physically bounded.
>>9352736
I would say that google cars have not reach the threshold of subjective experience. But again that goes into the argument of what is subjectivity and the Buddhist line of thought of no self.

>>9352761
>Then dogs, dolphins, reptile, and organisms with a brain have consciousness and subjective experience.
All those creatures can detect the presence of colour, just like a camera can detect colour, but there's no way to tell if they experience it the same way we do. We have a concept of red, there's a sensation associated with the stimuli of red that could be different for every individual, that is what we call qualia. A computer simply turns what it sees into ones and zeroes and transforms that into an output, while a conscious being has a sensation in adition to producing an output.

Because one can only sense what happens to oneself, there's no way to tell if other animals or even other humans have this subjective experience.

>Besides people know what pain is, physical reaction that concentrate focus to one particular area to keep that area from being damage. Pain can be controlled by anesthesia, and electroshock.
Pain can't be controlled, only the sensory inputs that give rise to pain can. One can stop that signal from getting to the conscious part of the brain and check whether the brain is reacting to the signal, but you can't feel what the other person does.

>Then there's no point in discussion. You say it's not physical but then you go on using language. Whatever you do you can't seem to escape language which is physically bounded.
It's not physical because you can't grab a ball of certain qualia and bounce it around, but it certainly exists, or else we wouldn't be talking about it.

Also, language isn't restricted to the physical, it's restricted to the human experience. Abstract concepts like fear or love aren't physical, but humans could talk about them before science could describe them.

>>9352838
You're still using language. Fear, love, unicorns, angels, god, soul, "red," and so on are just words. They are tied down to physical symbols and sound. All fiction is tied down to representations.

It's pattern recognition. A blind person can see
if they are able to learn and recognize patterns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3p8z3VS9lQ

>>9352878
If language works for things like beauty and infinity, I don't see why it can't work for subjective experience.

A blind person can use other means to perceive what's in front of them, but they can't actually experience the qualia of sight. There's a difference between knowing that a wall is blue and recognizing other blue things, and sensing the colour blue. It's possible for a blind person to do the former but not latter, no matter how well they can recognize the pattern with their device.

>>9352451
>to say that conscious experience goes beyond brain activity would be spitting in the face of all the work in neurosciences, tCMR, MRI, lesion studies, and conscious brain surgery that has occurred in the last 100 years. You would also be ignoring the improvement in A.I. and neural networks that led to self driving cars

So...nothing?

>>9347501
What the fuck is "qualia"?

>>9352451
>>9353314

Though I would also gladly spit in those things' faces in general, regardless of any impications or lack thereof.

>>9347813
Fuck off that's not what spook means you piece of shit

>>9347501
The really sad part is that he's somehow incapable of just admitting that the hard problem is not accessible to science. That would literally solve everything, he could continue writing about functional aspects of perception and awareness which don't actually have anything to do with the problem of subjective experience as such and everything would be fine.

>>9353318
Essentially subjective experience/perception. Google it Anon

>>9351941
Except it couldn't? Any other idea is about things I know only mediately, i. e., real things, or it will simply be about things I can't understand because are completely alien to my experience. Also, your line of thought can be used to dismiss any argument that pretends to go beyond the mere logical form.

>>9353498
Not accessible by science? What else would it be accessible by? Words? Language? We can't know nothing?

>>9353344
Well I hope you never get Alzheimer, brain cancer, or any other neural degenerate disease.

>>9347501

Where exactly in this statement does he tackle actually demonstrating that "Qualia" exists beyond the definition established by neuroscience?

>>9353869
>What else would it be accessible by?
Direct experience? Better speaking: it IS direct experience. Science is a later construct. If you believe science is the sole criterion for believing or not believing in something, you're completely inverting the order of knowledge. And I'm not discrediting science by saying it is a 'construct', it's a neuter term: we have direct knowledge, we have methodological ('objective') knowedge, and we have confuse knowledge (that has the same objects as science but doesn't have any methodology).

>>9353869
A lot of this kind of confusion stems (no pun intended) from the idea that (reductionist) materialism/naturalism is some kind of a priori self evident starting point and that even thinking about abandoning that ontology turns falshood into truth, good into bad and suddenly the house is on fire.
Husserl cured me. Read a bit about/by him.
>>9353888
This.

>>9353869
>Not accessible by science?
Science works through observation of phenomena that can be reproduced by others. The existence of subjective experience cannot be reproduced by others as it is not an observed phenomenon but the act of observation itself.

>>9353914
>>9353919
We should add that if one denies that there's such a thing as subjective experience, one has to deny that there's any experience and, therefore, the idea of knowledge itself would make no sense. Sometimes those people remember me of dogs that, when you point to something, keep looking at your hand instead of the direction you're point to.

>>9353919
But you're still trying to describe it using language. It's like saying unicorn exists and is not accessible by science. Either way you're still using words. "Subjective Experience" is then only words.
Besides, subjectivity is debatable. What I feel. What I see. What I think. What I believe. What I say. Are don't really exists since the self, "I, me, my," are just illusions. Again this goes to the Buddhist concept of no self. If you ever taken drugs or intently try to meditate, you'll find that the different system that makes up "you" are always shifting. Shifting attention, and focus, vision, and so on. Even the words you say or write you only have an illusion of control. Hell the Greeks knew this very well that's why they say to "call the muses."

>>9353960
>It's like saying unicorn exists and is not accessible by science.
You can easily describe what an observation of a unicorn would look like. You can describe an experiment that would confirm the existence of the unicorn and this experiment could be reproduced by anyone, if unicorns existed. You can't do that for subjective experience.

>>9353951
Indeed.
>>9351614 put it quite well:
>you can't have a subjective negation of subjectivity

Wittgenstein made a nice related remark - can't quite remember where thought. I'm paraphrasing here:
What can I say about the proposition 'the world exists'? It's no wff, since it's negation, being "the world, including me, does not exist', is nonsensical.

>>9353960
>no self
Have you read any Derek Parfit?

I'm afraid that you're conflating problems of identity with qualia thought. You're completely off with the unicorn analogy. Qualia are fundamental and necessary. Analogies don't apply. Can you describe a conceivable possible world without qualia? Think about Wittgenstein's remark.

>>9353984
You can't do that for god. You can't do that a soul. You can't do that for an afterlife. Then it is just a word.
You're pointing to something where more than half the people in the room can't tell what you're pointing to. Then you say it's there but you can't physically see it.

>>9353994
God, soul and afterlife aren't direct experience. Indeed, direct experience never goes beyond itself, so anybody that claims to 'feel' God, for instance, is just jumping from a (direct) feeling to the conclusion of the existence of a real being.
And what is 'then', 'it', 'is', 'just', 'a', 'word'? Try to explain it to me without using words, if you can't, then you're stuck in language and everything you say is just wordplay.

>>9353994
I'm looking forward to your reply to my challenge (>>9353991), but let my already reply to you.
>You're pointing to something where more than half the people in the room can't tell what you're pointing to. Then you say it's there but you can't physically see it.
1. The the ontic status of qualia is not determined democratically. Obviously.
2. Ofcourse you 'can't physically see it'. The seeing is the subjective experience itself.

>>9354024
>subjective experience
For the sake of consistency/clarity, I probably should have just said 'qualia' instead. My bad

>>9354014
Philosophy is all wordplay. Philosophy is the study of language.

I'm saying direct experience does exist. But when I say it's a specific neural processing that we have yet to find exactly people say no you can't find it because it's not physical.
I believe qualia physically exists too and I say it's the triggering of "this is a qualia" due to sensory neural overloading. But then people disagree and say, "No we can't know nothing. Qualia, Subjective experience, will never be described by science or be reproduced in a machine."

>>9353994
>>9354014
Also, about the no-self thing, indeed there's no self if by it we understand anything beyond our immediate experience, or anything beyond the pure subject of such an experience (but I think that the 'subject' is mostly a pretty useless concept, a virtus dormitiva like the 'faculties', we could say). Now, what you and other qualia-deniers are trying to do is to reduce the immediate to the mediate, the prior to the posterior. And when we talk about 'direct experience' you, instead of looking at where I'm pointing to, only stare my hand and say 'But that's just a hand!'.

>>9354037
I haven't seen what you just wrote when I wrote my answer to >>9353994, but I will keep it just in case it could be properly directed to someone.
About philosophy being wordplay, it will depend by what we understand by it: if we never get beyond the words, or if the words are just a means and not an end in itself. I call my stance on these matters 'parallelism', which is basically: we can indeed infer qualia from neural processes (and vice-versa I believe, I don't know much about neuroscience), but that's because they're correlated things, it doesn't make sense to say that one is the cause of the other. The neural processes are things I feel, but the feeling itself isn't a 'thing' I feel. We could say that 'real things' and 'phenomena' are the same thing from different perspectives, but we can't reduce one perspective to another, only make correlations.

>>9353994
>Then you say it's there but you can't physically see it.
it refers to the fact of being able to physically see things in the first place. So it's very much 'present', unlike God or the soul which are not aspects of observable reality. Subjective experience is not observable as a separate part of reality because it is the way in which reality is observed.

>>9354024
Of course a representation will never be the real thing. A representation is a representation. A phenomena is the thing itself.
But then you say the phenomena is not physical, you can't see it, you can't feel it, you can't reproduce it. You can only interact with in in the world of representations. That's where I have a problem.
You have a pointer that doesn't point anywhere.

>>9354036
I think subjective experience is better than qualia because qualia are often described as a "thing-like whats-it-likeness", i.e. as countable and generally treatable like objects, which makes them vulnerable to a certain class of objections which doesn't work on subjective experience as such.

>>9354089
So do you agree then that it will eventually be possible to reproduce subjective experience and qualia in a machine? That it is not human bounded, carbon bounded, or biology bounded. That there is a set of principles we can elicit and applied generally?

>>9354097
>You have a pointer that doesn't point anywhere.
Now things are starting to get more clear. You have to consider the fact that, prior to it being a pointer, it just 'is'. Also consider that it just POINTS to something, it's not reducible to the thing it points to.
(Note: whenever I use caps, read it as if it were itallics)

>>9354111
>So do you agree then that it will eventually be possible to reproduce subjective experience and qualia in a machine? That it is not human bounded, carbon bounded, or biology bounded. That there is a set of principles we can elicit and applied generally?
Why would I agree to that? It's a priori impossible to verify whether any machine, no matter it's performace, has subjective experience.

>>9354130
Then we go back to a pointless discussion about p zombie because by your argument you cannot show that anyone else except you have subjective experience. That is everyone is a p zombie except you.

When exactly do you have subjective experience? As a sperm cell or egg cell? Inside the womb? First breath? We're all machines to begin with.
First we learn how to differentiate our self from the environment. We learn how to speak. We learn about memory. We learn to describe our inner states.

>>9354097
see>>9354121
We're indeed discussing the structure. The mystery is not how it is, but that it is.
(I just wanted to add that I don't really agree with the whole 'pointer' analogy. It suggests - in my interpretation of the analogy at least - that it's a relation with something really 'out there'. I think it's rather a dialectic of distinguishing and relating that we're seeing here. But I might be going a bit to much off topic here and clearly my idealism is showing.)

>>9354099
>because qualia are often described as a "thing-like whats-it-likeness"
If that's the case, I completely agree with you. That's not the proper definition of qualia thought, is it?

I really have to go now. I hope that when I come back to this thread somebody has met my challenge (>>9353991)

>>9354169
>you cannot show that anyone else except you have subjective experience
Indeed. I'm not him but >>9354121 btw, I'm only answering because I was going to talk about a problem I have with subjective experience, even though I'm an antireductionist.
One thing that confuses me is that, even though subjectivity is a completely discardable concept when we're dealing with the external world, somehow we feel uncanny when we imagine that other people don't have it, but why if it doesn't make any difference in their behaviour? Why is it so important to us that they have such a superfluous detail? I'm not trying to prove anything by those questions, it's just something that I find odd.

>>9354169
>Then we go back to a pointless discussion about p zombie because by your argument you cannot show that anyone else except you have subjective experience. That is everyone is a p zombie except you.
>When exactly do you have subjective experience? As a sperm cell or egg cell? Inside the womb? First breath? We're all machines to begin with.
>First we learn how to differentiate our self from the environment. We learn how to speak. We learn about memory. We learn to describe our inner states.
Well, yeah. I don't think the hard problem really provides for a lot of fruitful discussion, beyond the part where people don't understand that it exists. It's not a problem in the sense that we can work on it to solve it, it's more a structural limitation to our understanding of the world.

As to the other parts, it's intuitively appealing to assume that subjective experience is tied to specific forms of activity of nervous systems. A bunch of biologists and people from related fields think that some rudimentary form of experience is present in very basic life-forms, some even go so far down as individual cells.

What you describe in terms of the development of cognitive skills is another area of research which is often confused with the hard problem even by famous academics. All the skills you describe modify the structure, content and texture of our subjective experience, but they don't really contribute to an explanation of why subjective experience exists in the first place. Because it's possible to devise research programms which track the development of these skills in the brain, people get confused and think we can therefore explain 'consciousness' as a whole. The problem is that consciousness means a combination of subjective experience and various cognitive skills (which however are completely observable from the outside and could for example be attributed to chatbots, even though we wouldn't assume that they have subjective experience).

>>9354191
Another problem I have is about time. We have no direct experience of the past or the future, so they're basically 'nothing'. But what is the present? There's no fixed thing in my direct experience, it's a constant flux... but what sense does it make to talk about a flux when past and future aren't themselves experienced? The present is the limit between two nothings, but then that means that it is nothing! But how can it be nothing if I have direct experience?

>>9354182
>If that's the case, I completely agree with you. That's not the proper definition of qualia thought, is it?
Last 'qualia debate' I had boiled down to that, for example Dennett's essay "Quining Qualia" works on a concept of qualia like this.

>>9354205
Just now I've noted my '!', I got carried away.

>>9354191
>Why is it so important to us that they have such a superfluous detail?
It's not superfluous really if you consider ethics. Also we have biological mechanisms for empathy which are probably activated by the idea that other people don't have feelings.

File: T00833_9[1].jpg (56KB, 611x730px) Image search: [Google]

56KB, 611x730px

>>9353991
>Can you describe a conceivable possible world without qualia?
Fine, I'll humor you. Not having subjective experience would be the same as non-existence (as there's nothing there to experience reality), which isn't something humans can conceive. It would just like experiencing death, except your body carries on with all biological and behavioral functions. It makes the term p-zombie pretty apt.


>>9354037
>But then people disagree and say, "No we can't know nothing. Qualia, Subjective experience, will never be described by science or be reproduced in a machine."
>>9354111
>So do you agree then that it will eventually be possible to reproduce subjective experience and qualia in a machine?

There lies the problem, even if we accidentally made a fully-conscious AI we would have no way of verifying whether it has subjective experience just like we have no way of verifying if other humans have subjective experience. Sure, you can isolate the sensory inputs, you can isolate the part of the brain that gives rise to subjective experience, but you can't actually examine consciousness because the observer can only perceive physical phenomena.

The best explanation science has given us thus far is "consciousness arises from different interactions between neurons", which is just the same as saying "neurons work in mysterious ways".

File: demiurge.jpg (22KB, 205x252px) Image search: [Google]

22KB, 205x252px

>>9353914

Otherwise known as a twist of Mind.

File: c3ja50301a-f1_hi-res.gif (135KB, 978x1356px) Image search: [Google]

135KB, 978x1356px

Really sad thread. Mind-forged manacles everywhere. Everyone agreeing with Dennett being just as oblivious to the fact that Materialism has yet to define Matter (let alone anything else) as to the question of who or what has put it at the foundation of Ontology.

>>9353914
Yep. I think a lot of people get into Dennett because they are attracted to the atheism. They begin to be dogmatic reductionist physicalists and view themselves as superior to religious people - which they basically are, since they have fewer unsupported hypotheses about reality than religious people to. But then these reductionist physicalists assume that anyone who talks about the hard problem of consciousness is trying to slip religion in through the back door. But this is not at all what is happening. From the point of view of a person who considers there to be a hard problem of consciousness, the reductionist physicalist is actually too religious, too dogmatic, too invested in an unsupported hypothesis about reality. From the point of view of someone who perceives the hard problem, the dogmatic reductionist seems like someone who has gone beyond science and logic and made an assumption - that consciousness can be reduced to matter - which is unsupported. It is the reductionist, indeed, who is being unscientific and illogical. Sometimes reductionists argue "but if science doesn't explain consciousness, what does?". But there is actually no logical reason to assume that an explanation is even possible.

>>9354037
>philosophy is the study of language
nope

>all the qualiafags just ignoring the interaction problem
Every time.

>>9354936
Nobody here ignored it and the problem was brought over and over again.

>>9355244
Clearly it was ignored because people are still talking like qualia is a coherent concept.

>>9355264
The problem of the concept of qualia, of it being incoherent etc. was brought too even by the 'qualiafags'. If you haven't read the discussions here then say nothing about the thread and make your own points instead.

>>9354499
>Fine, I'll humor you. Not having subjective experience would be the same as non-existence (as there's nothing there to experience reality), which isn't something humans can conceive. It would just like experiencing death, except your body carries on with all biological and behavioral functions. It makes the term p-zombie pretty apt.
Cool. Perfect answer IMO. I just wanted to establish qualia as necessary. QED

>>9354839
Well put. The observations about the reductionist matches my experiences too. Thought I'll add that, at least with my friends, the scientific minded people tend to be, after much debate ofcourse, able to recognize and acknowledge the dogmatic - and problematic - nature of their position. More so than most gnostic religious folks I've encountered. I have to give them credit for that.

>>9355960
Believing that p zombies are possible means that you have ignored the interaction problem.

File: really.jpg (8KB, 250x238px) Image search: [Google]

8KB, 250x238px

>>9347501

>2017
>Taking the guy who invented 'Brights' seriously

>>9347730

>Analytic philosophy is the new continental philosophy on /lit/

Wrong. We Conties own /lit/ and continue to laugh at Analytic retards who, in believing language to be at fault with it comes to philosophy, fall back upon what can only be described as the bastard child of Math and Logic.

In time you'll see they too are flawed, and then you're really fucking stuck.

>>9355984
Could you expand a bit on your objection? I'm afraid I don't directly see the link with p zombies and the interaction problem.

>>9356009
>yay in-group
>boo out-group
keep spookin

File: tips moustache.jpg (11KB, 225x225px) Image search: [Google]

11KB, 225x225px

>>9356039
>>9356039

All Anglo-Saxon Analytic charlatans must hang.

>>9356022
Saying "I have qualia" is a physical action which has traceable physical causes. Claiming that qualia has no physical effects is the same as claiming that it doesn't exist. There is no argument to be made for qualia that doesn't have a clear bias; there is no argument that can be made for qualia that can't be applied to any conceivable non-physical thing.

>>9356061
It was already discussed, see:
>>9351911

About
>Claiming that qualia has no physical effects is the same as claiming that it doesn't exist
No, it just says that qualia have no physical effect.
>There is no argument to be made for qualia that doesn't have a clear bias; there is no argument that can be made for qualia that can't be applied to any conceivable non-physical thing.
The question of bias was discussed too, see:
>>9353852
>>9354014

>>9356076
Those posts have sidestepped the issue of providing a reason why the idea of "direct experience" is any more necessary than the idea of flying spaghetti monsters.
>Indeed, spaghetti monster never goes beyond itself, so anybody that claims to 'feel' direct experience, for instance, is just jumping from a spaghetti monster to the conclusion of the existence of a real thing.
And if you abandon the axiom of "anything that exists, must be necessary", you can't make arguments; you have nowhere to speak from.

>>9356100
The example you provided falls into what I've referred:
>things I can't understand because are completely alien to my experience
>"anything that exists, must be necessary"
You're talking about the PSR? Well, you're using ill-defined concepts. What is 'to exist'? Do numbers exist? Do mathematical truths exist? If by 'existing' you mean 'being physical' then obviously if something has no physical effects it will not 'exist'. However, if by 'existing' you mean 'being necessary' then physical things can't exist, because, as I showed here >>9351911, causality is only a practical truth.
Consciousness can't be explained because that to which things are explained can't itself be explained.

>>9356131
But you must accept causality as true to make your post, so entertaining the idea of it not being true is not allowed.
>Consciousness can't be explained because that to which things are explained can't itself be explained.
If I isolated the causal chain connected to the making of this statement, it could be totally explained in terms of physics. You cannot physically make an argument for the nonphysical. The idea of qualia came from a physical place, so it can only be physical.

>>9356192
(read my caps as italics, I'm not screaming or angry)

>But you must accept causality as true to make your post
I have to admit it as PRACTICALLY true, I only entertain the idea of it not being REALLY true.

>If I isolated the causal chain connected to the making of this statement, it could be totally explained in terms of physics.
Yes, I myself wrote about it here >>9351507:
>my physical act of writing this is determined solely by physical events

>You cannot physically make an argument for the nonphysical
The problem is that the ARGUMENT isn't a physical thing. Note: I'm talking about the signified, not about the physical signifier. About this question, see: >>9354121
This might seem circular: my experience points to the physical world that points to an idea, but what really have is the sequence: sensations -> physical things -> concepts.

>>9356192
One note. It is curious that you qualia-deniers are only selectively skeptical: you use words mostly in an unreflected or instinctive manner, but when it comes to what you deny you're very critical and demanding of 'definitions'. And somehow 'matter' is, to you, a way more clear and distinct idea than 'direct experience'.

>>9356227
>(read my caps as italics, I'm not screaming or angry)
Anon, you *may* want to use asterisks to show emphasis instead.

>>9356283
It's because I'm used to Schopenhauer sometimes writing LIKE THIS. Also I don't like the asterisks very much.

>>9356227
It seems to me that your only reason for thinking that it can't be explained is because you lack the imagination to envision what an explanation would look like.

A human looks at a thing and reports the presence of something. You have them look at other things and they always report that presence there. So we know that there must either be a presence projected from the human onto everything, or there is a presence in everything that the human is able to detect. There is no reason to assume that any of this is beyond explanation.

>>9356292
>It seems to me that your only reason for thinking that it can't be explained is because you lack the imagination to envision what an explanation would look like.
It may be the case. At least I can guarantee that its explanation would be something completely different of what we now understand by 'explanation'. It wouldn't be a difference of mere degree, as the physicalists wish, but a complete difference of nature.

>>9356227
>The problem is that the ARGUMENT isn't a physical thing.
Representations are still physically bounded. Symbols are marks on paper. Language is sound. The symbol grounding problem has already been solved.

There's no isolation. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Books can be burned. Ideas can be destroyed in the same manner that the Aztec culture, all its manuscripts, institutions, and beliefs was completely obliterated.
>>9356240
Nobody is denying Qualia or subjective experience. The argument is whether they are physical and how they may be represented in a model. Apparently the philsopher's approach is "It can't be done. We can't know nothing." The neuroscientist approach is "It's all brain activity. Let's do more brain experiments." The engineers perspective is "Who cares whether we can describe it. Just do it. Just fucking build skynet."

>>9356330
You're right, they're physically bounded (I think you're talking about the signifiers here...), but it is still important to make a distinction.

>Nobody is denying Qualia or subjective experience. The argument is whether they are physical and how they may be represented in a model.
Oh... the way some denialists have argued here seemed like they were denying subjective experience.
To me the relation between qualia and physical things is the relation between signified and signifier (if you're experiencing the qualia), but one between signifier and signified (if you're the one trying to infer them from the observation of neural processes). The problem is: where physicalists see a reduction of qualia to physicality, I only see a correlation or parallelism; another way I express it is that subjective experience and physical existence are the same thing viewed from two different perspectives, so they're indeed one thing, but that thing isn't just this or that perspective.

>>9356330
Also, I think the origin of the bias of physicalism is that the physical perspective's object is the common world while the phenomenical perspective's object is the individual and private world, so the former can be used more adequately as a collective tool, while the latter is useful only to the individual (he can create his 'phenomenical sciences', but it is somehow impossible to make them as methodological and collective as physical ones).

File: feelsmadman.jpg (95KB, 330x357px) Image search: [Google]

95KB, 330x357px

>>9347501
This is possibly one of the dumbest things claiming to be philosophy I've read.

>>9347588
The anon with the hitler dubs was correct and I will tell you why.

Dennett's "qualia" is an empty value, a strawman he invents to make a false distinction as foundation of a category. The assumptions made in OP after his input-processing-output model disregards the existence of human empathy, the common palette of human emotions, and the mystery of the human unconscious.

You're looking for the soul in the black box that stands apart from the strawman. Exactly where everyone else has looked for it.

>The perspective. It will never be possible to literally put yourself in the place of other, experiencing everything like he does, coming to the conclusion that it is impossible to prove the existence of qualia in any being exterior to the observer.

What a load of bullshit. The author of that sentence has never inferred anything or is not aware of second and third order effects. One does not need to perfectly observe in order to know something. Ask an astrophysicist about the pale blob on his monitor and he will tell you the composition of the atmosphere and whether an heavenly body light years away has liquid on its surface. Analytics is mostly old faggots not realizing they have made fundamental mistakes in their pondering.

The old man in OP's picture is a retard and this thread has bummed me out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHzOOQfhPFg

>>9356475
>the individual and private world
There is no reason to believe that is a thing though. It comes from misinterpreting the nature of agent.

>>9353914
How to get into Husserl? I've a class about logical investigations ii and I'm struggling to understand

>>9356283
I prefer /this/.

>>9347501
I've never understood why Dennett is taken seriously.

>>9356061
>Saying "I have qualia" is a physical action which has traceable physical causes.
In the same way a p zombie or even a simple computer program saying "I have qualia" is a physical action which has traceable physical causes.
>Claiming that qualia has no physical effects is the same as claiming that it doesn't exist
Claiming that qualia has no physical effects is the same as claiming that it doesn't physically exist, would be more accurate. Qualia, for me, do necessarily exist.
>There is no argument to be made for qualia that doesn't have a clear bias; there is no argument that can be made for qualia that can't be applied to any conceivable non-physical thing.
This sounds just like the arguments against the necessity of philosophy. (The object of) philo, much like qualia, is simple defined as something fundamental and therefore necessary. As for qualia, can you describe a conceivable possible world without qualia?
There is no need for an argument for qualia, since - from my perspective, my - qualia exist tautologically and necessarily. They are in this sense more fundamental than the physical world.
The whole problem is their nonpublic nature.

>>9356950
How?

>>9358370
"Experience" is not passive, it is an action. To experience means an input entering the nervous system and creating an output, though that output can be very minor. The idea of a private world mistakenly labels experience as being passive.

Agent is a presence associated with experiences, thoughts, and movements. Conscious is the capacity for a system to sense agent, and consciousness is the capacity for a system to sense and correct its own level of conscious. The idea of a private world necessitates that agent is projected from an individual onto everything they associate with agent; that agent is contingent on the individual.

Here is the paradox in that: no human ever has, and ever will perceive multiple agents. The only way this could be so is if there is only one agent, or if the information of one agent in a system completely precludes the information from another agent. If the latter case were true, it means we would still be able to test if a system was conscious by trying to give it the information of an agent. If the preclusion theory holds, then a conscious system will not be able to absorb the information whereas one that isn't conscious will. But this doesn't actually need to be tested to rule out the preclusion theory, because the preclusion theory necessitates that itself be untestable. This is a test, therefore it is wrong and agent is a property of reality that is sensed by conscious systems, not something projected from conscious systems onto reality.

>>9357601
no, you wouldn't

>>9353490
It is when people get spooked by it in the same way they get spooked by the idea of "mind"

>>9359128
So basically a private world demands a purely passive experience, that is, one that ends in the input or in the processing stage, and which, therefore, would not correlate to any physical event?
The part of agent, conscious and consciousness is a bit obscure to me. More specifically the part of agent being 'a presence associated with'.
Some questions I have:
What kind of presence and what kind of association is the agent? Is 'agent' what we usually understand by 'self', 'I', 'subject'?
If so, then what you called 'conscious' is what we usually understand by 'self-awareness'? And 'consciousness' is a kind of 'awareness of self-awareness'?
And what is the difference between the agent and the individual?

>>9359186
Well the statement "I move" is equivalent to "Agent moves", and that statement signifies that the referred to movement has had its association with agent measured. When an action/thought/movement has its association with agent measured, it is said to be a conscious action/thought/movement. What exactly this association does is still a mystery though.

The idea of an individual only exists in the preclusion/private world model.

>>9359222
Ah, but it seems that in the end we're just substituting 'agent' for 'I' or 'self'. Things don't get more clear, only more abstract and objective, in the sense that you detach yourself from your 'self' by treating it as an 'other'.
My idea of private world is more one of perspective: only I have access to the first-person perspective of this 'self' or 'agent' so I call that perspective 'private'; however, people can still have access to the same thing (so it wouldn't be really private), the problem is that it would be a mediated and third-person access.

>>9348535
A large selection of the population don't have the faculties for experiencing colour the same way many do. If all experience was taken up exactly the same by everyone we would all agree about aesthetic experiences. We would all know exactly what we mean by the term green as a matter of experience. But we don't, so it isn't.

>>9359434
You're essentially saying communication is impossible because communication can't be perfect.

>>9359451
No, I'm saying if the entirety of what it is to be human were objective then we would all be in agreeable on aesthetics, morality, value issues and in general most aspects of materiality. But it isn't the case and I think it's naive to think it is. Furthermore, without subjectivity how could we define materiality?

>>9359504
That's just because those terms aren't properly defined i.e. communication isn't perfect.

File: FB_IMG_1491410028536.jpg (11KB, 219x280px) Image search: [Google]

11KB, 219x280px

>>9359524
Thanks for the iou Locke. I'll check back in 500 years when you cracked the code.

>>9347501

the real question is why did his book on memes get blacklisted from amazon in the recent free speech-i mean holocaust book ban.

Also does he really belong as one of the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse?

well three now that hitchens died of throat cancer...