>"I will now explain consciousness" >gives a

>>9058348
Sure, everybody loves Santa.

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>See? Consciousness was just an illusion after all
>If you disagree with me you believe in mysticism
The raw truth. It really just pisses me off when I see shit like pic related or just people like OP who try to imply otherwise. Humans are NOT important. Your life is NOT important. Stop giving people the hope their consciousness is anything but a sad illusion.

>>9058397
The people who make some of those theories must surely be p-zombies. How one could have an inner life and think half of those could be true is just beyond me.

>>9058406
>p-zombies
>>>/his/

Would an exact replica of the functions of a brain composed of countless quadrillions of water pipes and valves have the same kind of consciousness we have?

>>9058433
yes.

>>9058433
Probably. You'd want to change the "water", "pipes" and "valves" for "electricity", "wires" and "circuits" though, just to be sure.

>>9058433
no shit, but if it were it'd be like the size of the solar system. Neurons are much smaller.

it would also be extremely slow

>>9058348
but I do believe in mysticism.

>>9058433
This is probably the strongest argument against Dennett and functionalism.

>>9058447
How is this an argument against functionalism? If mental states are nothing more than functional states, then there is nothing that distinguishes a brain from the water pipe machine, besides the way it's built.

Dennett's view of the mind is already identical to that which you have of the water pipes, he gladly bites this bullet.

>>9058486
does this water pipe brain also have a water pipe body and water pipe organs? Does it inhabit a world made up of water pipe creatures and water pipe matter?

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>>9058406
The people who believe others are p-zombies must surely be p-zombies. How one could have an inner life and the slightest shred of cognitive ability and think that other humans aren't human because of the content of their beliefs is just beyond me.

>>9058491
Not necessarily. You could build some sort of interface that will allow you to feed it all its sensory input and body responses.

>>9058348
What experiences the illusion?

>>9058546
Dennett is using illusion in a purely cognitive/functional way. There doesn't have to be any subject being deceived. The illusion is simply the brain referring to things such as "consciosuness" and "me" in a way that isn't metaphysically correct, but is useful for it to do. An evolutionary hack.

>>9058553
But dude I want to feel special and entitled to my existence. I mean, what if, souls, you know?

>>9058553
That does seem a bit dismissive, to imply the brain creates the mind when there's really no need to accomplish the same evolution airy goals

>>9058348
In everyday life I'm apt to take a strictly mechanistic approach to explaining consciousness, and it works. Though I will not delude myself into thinking I know the full nature of the universe with certainty. The latter is why I'm not so keen on him, or the "skeptic" "community" in general. They are religious.

I also don't like that he, rather than simply speaks of, seems to use his friendship with Feynman to advance his own point. Susskind does similar. Feynman was, though he'd despise the term, a philosopher, and had an intellectually honest and solid epistemological foundation behind his way of thinking. ie, he knew what it was to know, had clearly thought through solipsism in a way that was not strictly reactionary, and genuinely wanted truth. These guys don't. They aren't about any of that, and underneath, their value system is all muddled up. Like Dawkins, as a clear example.

>>9058576
Can you clarify what you mean by this?

>>9058348
Qualia is a retarded concept and, although I'm not familiar with his actual arguments, or what this thread is about at all, I'm willing to agree that he has a point.

>Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism"
That's fucking gay as shit though.

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>"I will now describe how gravity works"
>gives a hand wavey explanation of how objects at a distance attract one another
>"See? Gravity was just an illusion after all. If you disagree with me you believe in mysticism"

>>9058348
People don't seem to grasp that mental representations carry no objective content. There are no actual photons being used to create the mental image of some memory you have stored in your brain. Thus "qualia" doesn't exist in the sense most people mean. All such impressions are effectively messages the brain tells itself that boil down to, "I am experiencing X." That's all it is. Just a fancy telegram. No actual images are stored anywhere in your brain.

>>9058590
A more efficient mechanism would be for humanity to exist entirely of philosophical zombies than to have any meaningful conscious in the first place.

>>9058641
.t man who doesn't understand the term qualia

>>9058829
Qualia don't exist. They are literally just an illusion. The problem is that the logical explanation for why we think qualia exist is so counterintuitive that it's pointless even arguing with most people, since amount of philosophical training required is significant.

>>9058843
>The problem is that the logical explanation for why we think qualia exist

Been in dozens of "consciousness" threads, and never has a single person posted this so called explanation.

>>9058810
But this exactly what Dennett's argument is, that when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, we all are philosophical zombies.

>>9058863
Here is an explanation I've posted before.

1/2
To understand the problem, you have to first understand that consciousness is a broad term that can mean a lot of different things. Let's first separate them into two different things: Access consciousness and Phenomenal consciousness. Access consciousness refers to the function of the brain: How we react to environmental stimuli, control our behavior, categorize information, and use language. There are no doubts here that biology can materialistically account for everything that goes on here. Phenomenal consciousness however is different. Here we are talking about why it feels like something from a first person perspective; why there's "something that it's like" to be you.

>>9060083
2/2

The brain is a very complicated collection of physical particles, interacting in a complex ways that causes you to behave in complex ways. But that should be all that those particles are doing: behaving. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case. You can correlate emotions with a certain area in the brain and say, when these neurons fire in this and this way with this intensity, that's emotion X. You can have a very complex functional understanding of how emotion X is caused and how it affects behavior. But with all that, it still doesn't tell us anything about what it is like to experience emotion X; it completely ignores the qualitative aspect. Consciousness is the only thing in the universe where asking how something functions doesn't seem to be able to give us any conceivable answers to the question of why it feels like something phenomenally from the inside. I think that highlights a big gap between explaining how something functions, and explaining experience. From this gap, we can infer that the frameworks of science clearly misses something here in terms of the structure/format of the explanation. Going by what science tells us about the world, this phenomenal experience should not be there, we should all be philosophical zombies without phenomenal experience, but we aren't.

Explaining Phenomenal consciousness away as "just an emergent phenomena" misses that there seems to be more than just function emerging. Water has properties not found in a single H2O molecule, but water properties emerging from H2O molecules together with the rest of the environment is something that at least in theory can be fully reducible. This is not the case with phenomenal experience.

>>9060087
why should it not be there. i think this idea that qualia needs explaining is from this misconception that scientific abstract concepts are "true" but in a sense all of these things are mind-dependent and come from your qualic experience. science just explains relations and predictions between things we see in our qualic experience. it doesn't have to explain qualia. qualia is reality. science just abstracts reality, it doesn't tell you what it "really is" that is all inaccessible in terms of physics etc and in a sense therefore it can only exist in an abstracted form. the only "really is" we have is our mind dependent qualic reality. it demands no explanation logically. Science deals with abstractions, not "feels"

>>9060087
And btw, our qualic experiences are identical to things happening in the brain.

>>9060087
And since qualia is identical to our brain processes, it doesn't need to be explained as a separate emergent process. Complex things of access consciousness can but phenomenal doesn't. that is illusory.

There is no hard problem.

>>9060128
With science we try to understand and explain how the world works. While science only works with abstractions, we can use those abstractions to better understand reality. To say that qualia "is reality" is to make a metaphysical assumption on the nature of qualia and an assumption that it can't be understood better.

If you hold that qualia doesn't need to be explained because qualia is simply "reality", then I just focus on what the nature of reality is that lets matter have first person phenomenal experiences.

>>9058641
>No actual images are stored anywhere in your brain
What does this even mean? You're talking nonsense based on an extremely narrow and esoteric definition of "storage" and "actual" X. By this definition there is no "actual" anything, whether macro, micro, or fundamental.

Reactionary opinions are the worst, most compartmentalized, disjointed hackjobs you will ever run into. It's all built on emotional desire.

>>9058433
Would a brain with no senses have the same kind of consciousness we have?

>>9058397
I feel like some of those groups are not exactly distinct but I don't feel like arguing about it

>>9060503
>>>9058641
>>No actual images are stored anywhere in your brain
I don't really like this meme. No specific images are stored in a specific physical place but that's not really an accurate representation of how memory is stored.

Living systems are more like a computer in the classical sense that while living they are computing. When computers were invented they didn't have external storage they just ran programs. So our memories are less like a set of bits on a hard disk and more like the array of binary values in RAM while performing a function.

When you think of "Dog" the array shifts and you draw different meanings from different parts of the brain. Say the image value for Dog=12 so to image Dog your brain calls parts 2+4+6=12 and together this is "Dog". But if someone says "Show me Dog" ie Show me 12 there is no 12 in your stream of consciousnesses there is only 2+4+6. Another person may arrive at Dog with 1+1+3+7 and when you try to directly relate your concept of Dog with theirs you find it does not "match".

You can arrive at 12 through 2+4+6 or 1+1+3+7 but the overall state of the whole array will be in two different patterns for the two different calculations. Furthermore everything is self-referential and recursive so it different and then again it will be different every time you access it because it will be at a different place in the stack.

In this sense memory is a functioning(in motion) time-space hologram.

>>9058397
That image can be reduced to just substance dualism and functionalism. The rest are either subsets or related philosophical perspectives that don't meaningfully alter the core disposition.

None of this debate has changed for several centuries.

>>9058406
>Implying we're not all p-zombies
Lol who cares? You're brain is just a bunch of analog processes controlled by chemical reactions and little zaps of electricity.

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>>9060610
>You're
Fuck I really am a p-zombie, welp just disregard my post

>>9060596
>No specific images are stored in a specific physical place but that's not really an accurate representation of how memory is stored.
That's about as relevant as whether an image is stored/ represented contiguously, its pieces indexed, or if it's generated via some function. It's all the same, ultimately an image can be rendered. A state within a given machine whereby the information that image is composed of, can be used in various ways. Whether that's rasterization into pixels, geometry extraction / gradient recognition and complex object recognition in the brain, or whatever. The underlying nature of computation, (ie signalling, and signal processing), is something all machines the universe allows to exist, are slave to.

>Show me 12 there is no 12 in your stream of consciousnesses there is only 2+4+6.
Numerical storage and representation in the brain varies, and can be mapped in various ways (altering its representation, whereby converting back to numbers might not be necessary). I tend to either create false memories and tag them as such (like you would a dream), loop them through the speech and auditory processing buffers, or hold it in the visual buffer and then extract arbitrarily into working memory. How networks of cells maintain state that can be translated to numbers is still not known.

>memory
Memory is just state. Memory is the creator of reality whether you're a rock or a brain.

>>9060596
dumb fuck

>>9058348
Read Stanislas Dehaene's "Consciousness and the Brain". There is a reason almost no actual neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, AI researchers take any of the "hard problem" nonsense seriously.

>>9060691
>There is a reason almost no actual neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, AI researchers take any of the "hard problem" nonsense seriously.

I'm not doubting you, but can you give me some citations on the lack of support from those professionals? Because all the Wiki gives me is "well it's debated a lot and inconclusive"

>>9058385
fbqb
>>9058348
The only people who take him seriously are reductionist fanatics who think he proves materialistic hard determinism but it's like creationists and 'christian scientists' where basically it's just uncritical mutual agreeing and mindless opinion validation.

>>9060701
It's hard to give evidence for a "lack" of anything... but if you look at most of the major proponents of things like "the hard problem of consciousness", they're almost always philosophers.
Also, the reason I say to read Dehaene's Consciousness and the Brain is because it explains just how much we actually know about the neural correlates of consciousness... and I think a lot of people who buy in to the "hard problem" do so because they don't really know how much we know about how the brain works. We know A LOT.

>>9060691
It's not that they "don't take it seriously", it's simply that there isn't anything to be done or said about it.

Open your mouth and generate output, for what? Use it directly, for what? Consider it widely in your field, with your colleagues, for what?

It is not about taking it seriously (which betrays your underlying attitude), it's just about a lack of relevance and utility. Just like sollipsism, while immensely useful and meaningful in a personal sense, is not widely considered.

Stop bothering to talk shit like a tribal ape, and use your head.

>>9060711
>>9060701
Also, one more thing... Patricia Churchland wrote a really excellent analysis of "the hard problem" that she called "the hornswaggle problem".

>>9058433
Makes you wonder what sort of consciousness the universe with its zillions of brains and galaxies and dark matter has.

>>9060717
ah cock swaggling. mhmm love to see a girl swaggle a cock like shes gargling warm milk on a hot summers day.

>>9060701
neuroscientists don't take the hard problem seriously because they don't know about it or they know about it but it's too scary, or most likely because they're too busy doing their job of crispring some genes into brain damaged mice and quantifying synaptic activity patterns.

>>9060726
you can't be conscious if you're not conscious of something. consciousness requires sensory inputs and as the brain is not conscious of its own inner workings, i would say its likely the universe is not conscious unless its consciouss of something outside of itself. you see, consciousness is a model; one side of a mapping.

>>9060742
the hard problem has nothing to do with neuroscience. its a myth.

>>9060711
>We know A LOT
Do we know how and why we have qualia? Why are little electric pulses in a tangled chunk of axons like anything?
I think a lot of people underestimate the hardness of the hard problem because they're not philosophers.

>>9060745
what do you think the hard problem is and why is neuroscience not relevant to it?

>>9060754
because all neuroscience is doing is trying to uncover the causal dependencies in the brain and the brains relation to the outside world. it doesn't need to know why things are like something. it makes no difference to the explanation.

we dont need an explanation for qualia because all science is doing is trying to find causal dependencies and abstract models of the universe. it doesnt actually relate to how things are in a metaphysical way. thats why some people like to think of science in terms of pragmatism; purely in terms of prediction. when science has models of electrons or any other phenomena, its not trying to describe it in a visceral way. it cant. it just describes its behaviour. that doesnt mean the visceral thing doesnt exist though its probably hidden from us in terms of what we can actually perceive. its the same for qualia. thats the visceralness of existence. we dont have to explain that. thats that. neuroscience is trying to look at causal dependencies. we forget that everything about qualia we perceive through qualia too yet we dont find a need to explain it because the science is the abstract part. one thing to see is that the world doesn't owe us explanations. we just look for them. qualia doesnt owe explanation. it is the firing of cells and if there were no qualia there would be no cells. they are dependent. they are eachother. it is existence. when you start asking "why is this the way it is" you get into absurdity because you aren't asking deducible questions about causal dependencies. youre just asking why isnt this like something else when we only have that hypothesis because we have imagination.

>>9060750
There is no "qualia"... just as there is no "vital force" in all life. People used to think that there existed this "élan vital" that existed in all living things, and it is what separated inanimate objects from animate ones. People simply couldn't conceive of the idea that life was simply chemistry... thats it. Even today, many layman have a hard time understanding that.
But thats ALL life is... chemical reactions. And similarly, there is no "qualia"... there are only complex systems of interconnected neurons and chemical neurotransmitters. That's it. I know it's hard to grasp... but that's all we are.

>>9060754
Neuroscience is a bottom up mechanistic approach. It's reverse engineering.

>>9060775
"the hard problem" really just boils down to the argument from ignorance... or the argument from personal incredulity. "I don't understand how it could be... therefore it cannot be"

>>9060777
neuroscience can be top down too

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>>9058348
>consciousness is spoken about
>qualia is the main focus
>the gaining of information and the forming of mental intent is just handwaved over and rejected as illusion
>skip over how information is inherently teleological in nature and using information to deny the reality of information

>>9060785
Yeah, I suppose it is bidirectional, and incorporates a number of scales. Just talking in comparison with something generally top down, like psychology and aspects of philosophy.

>>9060787
>Claim to have proof of anything
>Base chain of axioms on the mind and senses
>Use the mind and senses to prove their own validity
>Irreducible self referential truth
>Even if a machine -was- the entire universe. it could not veritably get around this
>Natural law

>>9060793
neuroscience is becoming increasingly top-down in terms of things like dynamic causal modelling, functional networks and their topology and ideas such as the free energy principle.

>>9060787
have you heard of our lord and savior Juergen Schmidhurber?

>>9060775
>there is no qualia
>cogito ergo sum

You can't just start your argument with something patently false and then try to support your argument from there.

Trying to dismiss the problem of qualia by ignoring its existence is a fool's errand. We might all just be chemicals, but to imply there is no you or I because "dude chemicals" without ever trying to ask or answer the question of "What makes these bundles of chemicals have subjective experience" is the worst way to act like you're somehow enlightened over the matter.

>>9060787
In 20 years, "qualia" will be remembered alongside "phlogiston" and "elan vital" as debunked ideas used to refer to a poorly understood phenomenon up until we learned how it actually worked.

>>9060800
?
You what

>>9060811
I don't give a shit about the Problem of Qualia. I care about the Problem of Intentionality.

>>9060812
You heard me.

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>>9060817

>>9060809
Not even Descartes accepted cogito ergo sum as an end, valid answer. His subsequent meditations go down other avenues.

See:
>>9060800

>>9060809
"You can't just deny the existence of elan vital... I am alive... you are alive. To imply that we aren't alive simply because we're chemicals without ever trying to answer "What makes these chemical reactions breathe and move?" is foolish.

It's the same thing. Many of the top philosophers of the day were proponents of vitalism. You're falling into the same trap.

>>9060809
hes not saying theres no experience, hes saying qualia isnt separate from the chemical reactions. again, you try to assume everything needs an explanation. things just exist and we draw lines on the dots to link their causal structure. thats what science is doing. wqualia is the existence. you get to the point of asking why is the electron the electron. it makes no sense. your need to explain qualia is from the confusion of being able to see things from both a third and first world perspective.

>>9060824
the chemical reactions are the breathing and moving. you're asking something tautological.

>>9060833
I know. I was making a point.

>>9060682
>>9060621

let me rephrase and see if someone can help me use better terms

The brain is an array of binary switch dependent gated circuits in which each can hold a charge from 0.1v to 1.0v but not zero(for example). If a charge is > 0.5v the switch opens the gate.

The whole brain must have a total charge of 100v but it can distribute the charges among its trillions of circuits. The "static" array states if you were to capture them in frames correspond to sensory experience and you remember by triggering these array states to form a "ghost" of past or imagined experiences.

A lot of switches hold no function except to store extra charge in locations where it might be needed. A lot of switches are dependent on other switches. Generally a change in one switch will cause a cascade switches and gates to open changing the configuration of the entire array. Multiple changes are happening in multiple locations simultaneously from multiple inputs in recursive feedback loops that either compliment or cancel out to form a cohesive experience.

This still doesn't explain why I am able to choose to recall experiences. It really has no bearing on consciousness. Its like were watching a movie and I'm asking why Romeo and Juliet suicide and you are saying "Well the laser in the blu-ray player decodes the data off the disc and this is transmitted to the TV and displayed as pixels"

neuroscience is autism

>>9060596
That doesn't quite match the consistent patterns we see from fmri studies which show people form the same concepts using the same brain areas.

Sure, that doesn't mean the process is similar down to individual neurons, it probably is not even possible, due to variations on neurodevelopment.

On the other hand

>that old hackneyed brain = computer meme

No, brains are not computers. They don't operate with bits and don't use numerical systems to represent something. You could call it a metaphor at best. You could say brains are like computers in some way, but not a literal sense.

>>9060852
When you separate things that much from their origins, they'll always sound absurd.

"The brain is an array of binary switch dependent gated circuits..."
"This still doesn't explain why I am able to choose to recall experiences. It really has no bearing on consciousness. Its like were watching a movie and I'm asking why Romeo and Juliet suicide and you are saying "Well the laser in the blu-ray player decodes the data off the disc and this is transmitted to the TV and displayed as pixels"

Is like saying "My body is individual DNA strands... that still doesn't explain how my heart beats."
or
"My car is made up of steel molecules bound together with aluminum molecules... still doesn't explain how it can go 100 mph on a highway"

You're overlooking the whole process, which is the point.

>>9060866
When you explain the process... you explain how its done. Hence Stanislas Dehaene's claim that (paraphrasing) "once we solve the easy problems, the hard problem will evaporate"

>>9060852
stop using the analogy to a switchboard or whatever fucking analogy that is. its retarded and unrealistic.

what do you mean it doesn't explain why you can choose to recall experiences? that is a brain process...

and that metaphor is shit. the plot of romeo and juliet vs. the tv projecting it is like how the brain works vs how physics works. i can rearrange that question as someone asking how a tree falls down in physics terms and getting an explanation of how the brain sees it. its not a good metaphor for consciousness.
again

dumb fuck

>>9060871
the hard problems are a non-problem. it has no consequence or predictions at all. its simply asking why something is something. its tautological. why is an electron an electron and not a quagtron

>>9060852
>This still doesn't explain why I am able to choose to recall experiences.
Now we arrive at the core. The experience of "choice". Choice is simply the experience of the brain (a state machine) moving through states as it attempts to arrive at a state the rest of its systems accepts as a conclusion, subsequently stores it, and lets the process as a whole fade. There is no real branch point at your point of "choosing", and the whole process is satisfactorily explained via a series of mechanical state changes guided by intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

Recall a childhood memory. Did you? It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't just spurred you to do so.

>>9058348
Why would he worry about being disagreed with if it's all just an illusion, he can't really be conscious of it

>>9060816
intentionality is a spook
it's all just chemicals bruh
t. thc
>>9060847
Except you miss the point entirely.
A complete description of chest matter in motion is a complete description of breathing. But what qualia is the chest experiencing?

>>9060882
huh?

>>9060882
>it's all just chemicals
>can't explain how it's chemicals without refuting yourself

>>9060887
yyour hard problem will never be answered. qualia = neurons. simple as.

>>9060894
Mate can you even read. See >>9060816

>>9060894
The problem he has is he's trying to shoehorn 13th century theology into present day neuroscience. He's arguing for Thomism, m8.

>>9060886
wut

>>9060775
>>9060778
>>9060711
If any of you can properly restate the arguments people make for the hard problem as clearly as possible (doesn't have to be long, simply explain why we think it poses a problem for science), and then explain why it's misguided, it would at least convince me you understand the arguments (and maybe change my mind).

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>>9060898
Where in the world did you get that at all from what I've said?

>>9060872
Do you just not get it?
They died because they were in love and thought the other had died. Pixels on a screen have nothing to do with experiencing love or irony. This is why I said neuroscience is autism.

>>9060874
>>9060874
>Recall a childhood memory. Did you? It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't just spurred you to do so.
This doesn't really address why there is a "you" or "I". Why there is a subjective experience. I could accept this to be true and all it would say is that experience is deterministic not where/why/how the experience itself comes to be. The only reason "I" have a childhood memory is because my serial machine state body has a subjective experience of a childhood where are those states stored? Where are the hard drives that I recall that configuration from?

>>9060911
I second this.
>>9060913
If reductive materialism isn't true then by law of excluded middle Thomism is.

>>9060911
The idea is that there are "easy problems" of consciousness (how the brain computes numbers, how we change our attention, etc, the mechanistic HOWs), and then theres the "hard problem" of consciousness, which is how all those mechanistic operations form "qualia" and "experiences".
The reason I (and Dan Dennet, and Stanislas Dehaene, and Pat Churchland, and everyone in the field) think it's a nonsense "problem" can best be explained by analogy.

The terms used... "qualia" and "phenomenal experience" are the same as "vital energy" and "phlogiston". They're used as shortcut terms to describe the whole processes happening as a result of the "easy problems".

An analogy would be:
"The easy problems of life are things like 'how does the heart pump blood, how do the muscles contract, etc, mechanistic questions... but the hard problem of life is 'how do those mechanistic processes form the 'elan vital' in all living things and the 'phlogistic fire of our metabolism'.

Point is... proponents of the hard problem are taking for granted that "qualia" exists simply because "it's obvious!". But I'm saying that the answers to the easy problems, once we have them all (which we don't yet)... will explain fully how consciousness works just like the easy problems of life explain fully how the "elan vital" works (in other words, how we are alive).

>>9060937
>This doesn't really address why there is a "you" or "I". Why there is a subjective experience.
I know this, and have agreed multiple times. We simply do not know. We will likely never know.

>>9060943
or, put even better... the answers to the easy problems will show us that there is no hard problem, and that qualia don't exist... just like the answers to the easy problems of life showed us that elan vital didn't exist.

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Is there any equivalent to materialism's hard problem for idealism?
If mind is fundamental doesn't that solve everything?

>>9060816
I intuitively understand the arguments for qualia, but I can't follow any intentionality arguments. I feel like they either make problems out of non-problems, or problems of intentionality only seem hard because they are the contents of phenomenal consciousness (qualia).

>>9060939
You what. Thomism is worlds apart from this discussion altogether. You have no idea what Thomism even is. If reductive materialism isn't true there are alternatives such as eliminative materialism or other understandings of mind-body dualism. However I'm rather bringing up how non-dualistic models can make sense of intentionality without being self-contradictory.

>>9060943
>I'm saying that the answers to the easy problems, once we have them all (which we don't yet)... will explain fully how consciousness works
Are you officially making an argument from ignorance then?

>how we are alive
Describe the difference between a living and dead organism.
>>9060950
>qualia don't exist
Describe the difference between a sentient and non-sentient entity.

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>>9060829
>the madman doesn't even realize he's using metaphysical interpretation to dismiss metaphysics

>>9060873
t. someone who has never in their entire life known what the hard problem is about

>>9060955
What's the problem with intentional monisms?

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>>9060953
It usually comes from Neoscholastics as they would still contend the modern rejection of Final Causality in philosophy. To summarize briefly, the idea of teleological notions in nature was rejected by the early moderns as mental constructs to understand the objects better rather than actual descriptions. Upon trying to discussion the mind-body problem we are now seeing people promote entirely physical systems and so since we swept all other claims of purpose in nature (final causality) under the rug of mental intention we now have to explain the lump itself to effectively maintain these physical systems. To make this worse, information itself inherently involves inferring (which is goal-directed) and so is inherently teleological. And so you're going to have to find a way to effectively argue for the validity of that physical system and Naturalism's rejection of inherent intent without and overcome this. This leads to the common criticism of Eliminative Materialism: "Believing beliefs don't exist".

>>9060969
Humans have an innate difficulty with complex systems and emergence. Most people never really understand the invisible hand of the market, they think there needs to be some top-down regulator of the economy; they don't understand evolution... they think there needs to be some top-down god that creates things;
even biologists argue about the exact definition of "life", for a very long time people thought there needed to be a single property that gives life.
Emergent properties are often hard to wrap your head around.

>>9060943
This is a general description of what the problem is. But you didn't provide any arguments (good or bad) for why the hard problem should be taken seriously. Have you never heard any? Do you not understand them? I understand functionalism perfectly well and can argue for it. Can you do the same for my side?

>>9061030
>they think there needs to be some top-down regulator of the economy
There is.

>they think there needs to be some top-down god that creates things;
There is, it is the underlying logic of the universe. That which drives all things and creates all things. That which drives all change of state in an arbitrarily subdivided region of space.

>>9061030
When you watch a school of sardines, or a flock of starlings... they look like they have a single mind. It seems almost IMPOSSIBLE that there isn't some single consciousness controlling the movements. They're too perfect.
But there isn't. It's simply the result of many individual actors following set rules. Consciousness is the exact same thing, with far more actors (neurons and neurotransmitters) and more rules.

>>9061049
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmO4Ellgmd0

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>>9061016
Could you un-jargon this a bit? Imagine I am some scientist who has never read any philosophy but is open to a change of mind. How would you convince me that intentionality pokes holes in physicalism?

>>9061049
The 'emergent' properties are properties of the individual elements though, except for brains. Individual starlings move around and react to stuff nearby, a million of them flock, there's no single flock consciousness. Individual water molecules roll downhill, a million of them make a waterfall, there's no single waterfall mind.
Individual neurons transmit electric pulses and release neurotransmitters, a million of them make a brain which has patterns of neural activity, and suddenly there is also consciousness.

>>9061084
Not the other guy but my amateur take on intentionality and physicalism is:
1. intentionality is 'aboutness'
2. consider the sentence "the sky is blue"
3. physically the sentence in 2 is just pixels in light/dark states on your screen
4. however the sentence in 2 is about the sky
5. the pixels in 2 don't innately have a property of being about anything, scroll up or down and those pixels will change states and stop having aboutness
6. so aboutness isn't a physical thing
7. the sentence in 2 is only about the sky (and has other non-physical properties like being true or false) when interpreted by sentient agents
8. things can have aboutness and aboutness is mental/non-physical so this suggests reality is at least partly mental (dualism, idealism) instead of purely physical

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The integrated information theory of consciousness is right. Also it implies panpsychism and everything has a "subjective experience" side, even if it is not processing sensory input and it is just reacting to external forces blindly.

>>9061047
But it is not different from everything that is and could be (that also is "somewhere").

The mathematical universe hypothesis is monist and either atheistic or panentheistic/patheistic.

>>9061126
>implies panpsychism and everything has a "subjective experience"
Is giving rocks minds really the best they can do?

>>9061121
I don't see where or why dualism has to enter the picture. Aboutness just seems like a physical system interacting with another in some way, and "meaning" emerges as a result.

The same way "the sky is blue" has no "physical meaning", a music disc doesn't either, but when you put it into a computer, the computer can aquire an aboutness by playing it just as we do. I find it very hard to draw a distinction between the computer and a brain, unless you help the brain along with qualia - but then we're talking about something different.

>>9061149
Is what follow from that theory. They would have some really primitive "minds". And even then, they might not be minds as we usually understand them, but rather just a subjective experience, albeit a really plain and boring one.

>>9061155
Why does a computer, or any other arbitrary system, not possess this "qualia"?

>>9061163
Well that is the hard problem. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. We have no way of knowing.

>>9061164
Hence:

>>9060716
and
>>9060800

>>9061155
>dualism
It's just an alternative to physical monism.
>"meaning" emerges
However it emerges, meaning is aboutness. "Big" means something about sizes.
>computer can aquire an aboutness by playing it
The computer can play it but it's not going to think the song is about anything.

"The sky is blue" is true or false only if it's about something. Physically, what makes some physical particles be about other ones?

>>9061180
Are you implying there is some sort of active ontological relationship between particles having an aboutness and the particles it has the aboutness "about"? Because this is demonstrably false. When you have a representation of a blue sky in your mind, you are not directly referring to some actual sky out there, you are referring to a model of a sky in your head. The same way is true for non-abstract objects. When you have an aboutness about some object you own, or a friend, that aboutness is also just about the model your brain has created for them.

So, there are no sets of particles actually "being about" any other sets, it's just sets of particles using their own information processing to imperfectly represent other sets by themselves.

>>9061210
What is representation if not aboutness?
Are our brain models good or bad and how do we know?
If I say the sky is blue am I right because the sky is blue or because the sky I see in my head is blue?
If I'm not right about everything I think then there must be an ontological relationship between the particles in my head that make my thoughts and the external objects those thoughts are about.
>imperfectly represent
it can't be imperfect if it's not about something

>>9058406

Nobody has an inner life. You just have the illusion that you're feeling and thinking. You aren't.

>>9060897
intentionality is even more of a pussy nonexistent problem than qualia now fuck off back to dagestan

>>9060937

the subjective experience is encoded in the very neurons in your brain. whats so hard to understand? so is the you. its just the essence of information exchange.

>>9060951

This is what i've been trying to say the whole time but from an indirect realism perspective. We assume this natural essence to the materialistic world when it is a mere abstraction and all we experience IS the mind. the hard problem of consciousness is one from epistemological barriers, not metaphysics or science.

>>9061354
Who is experiencing the illusion then?

>>9061504
You are the illusion. The illusion of balance.

>>9061510
>muh circular logic

>>9061510
>I sense the illusion, therefore I am.
checkmate

>>9058433
no

>>9061457
>>the subjective experience is encoded in the very neurons in your brain.
only materialists have faith in this statement

>>9061567
im an idealist.

>>9060811
This.
History is going to repeat itself once more.

>>9058435
>>9061559
Fight

>>9058514
>some sort of interface
You mean like a fleshlight, anon?

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>>9058810
>A more efficient mechanism would be for humanity to exist entirely of philosophical zombies

Self interest is the reason we got as far as we did.

Everyone thinking they're a special snowflake and the hero of their story pushes them to creative, beneficial solutions to nature's challenges.

>>9060744
It doesn't have to be conscious of anything other than it's own existence.

Perhaps it also has illusory memories.

It is likely you are a Botlzmann brain living in a dream state of perceived past and present instead of a human shitposting on a computer.

>>9060866
>"My body is individual DNA strands... that still doesn't explain how my heart beats."
DNA is irrelevant to explaining how heart beats. The mechanisms of how DNA produces an organism and how heart muscles contract and relax to produce a bloodflow are completely separate

What are you trying to prove with this? There is no middle ground whereby you could or even should invoke both concepts in answering the question.

>When you separate things that much from their origins, they'll always sound absurd.
If they can be distanced so far apart that it'll sound absurd without committing a fallacy, then surely they must be two different things and one cannot be answered with the other.

>>9061464
You have a weird idea of what an explanation of a phenomena is.

>Don't know what X is
>Well my dude, X is simply Y!
>Well what is Y?
>P-pointless question, Y is just reality itself dude!
>What is the nature of Y that allows for X?
>Don't worry about it!

Saying X is just Y does not fully account for how X works if we don't fully know how Y works. You've just used word games to escape the question.

I don't take him seriously. Here is what he does. He simply stands on top of the solid rock currently accepted science and sprays a load of currently unverifiable conjectures, claiming he has reached a higher level. When the solid rock gets higher, he'll simply take a few steps on top of that and possibly have to alter his conjectures to be consistent with the new science. Repeat

>>9061798
i dont think thats possible. the brain isnt conscious of its own existence or inner workings (i.e. ite generative model) its only conscious of the person it sits inside. A person doesn't represent themselves do they. its a small part of them; the brain.

>>9061983
dont you think we're never going to be able to answer that question? i just dont see why we have to see qualia as something additional onto our brain processes.

>>9058493
If you believe that there is no inner experiential state of being, dismissing notions of it as illusion, than no fuckin shit that justifies the claim of p zombie

>>9058573
You're a retard on collosal proportions if you legitamately think that has fuck all to do with the case for consciousness.

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Isn't Daniel Dannett a functionalist? I thought they believed in consciousness, insofar as it's the product of cognitive processes.

>>9061983

I have an interesting question; in a world of p-zombies, would they come out with the same debate about qualia as we are having now?

>>9062955
The argument isn't necessarily that we have to have something additional as in a new substance (dualism). You can hold that there is a hard problem, and that there is qualia, but that it's are entwined in physics somehow, and we just don't know how. But simply saying qualia is the brain processes doesn't magically get rid of the problem. We are not simply asking what substance qualia is made of, we are asking how it works. Explaining how it works seems different from other problems, because it's not a question of function, but a question of why it feels like something phenomenally from a first person perspective, which is why it is called the hard problem.

>>9063031
The zombies used in the traditional thought experiment would, yes. But you can imagine different kinds of zombies. If phenomenal properties have causal influensers over physical properties, then you would see differences. You would think those zombies would not understand any arguments made for hard problems of consciousness, not understand what qualia even means. A lot of people in this thread would qualify for being such a zombie.

>>9063008
Functionalists believe in consciousness, just not phenomenal consciousness.

>>9063101
But in a monist world, does it seem that qualia is a necessity of systems ( a la brain) having explicit representations of the world and themselves in it?

>>9063008
He is a functionalist, which is the point of OPs post.

>>9063123
No, but the hard problem doesn't concern itself with the ability to represent the the world or concepts of self. In contrast to the hard problem, those are considered easy problems.

The hard problem is why these mechanisms don't just happen in the dark without a phenomenological subject that experiences it. Dennett would stop me there and say "BUT THEY DO!" Here it comes down to a disagreement on the empirical value of first person phenomenological experiences.

If you're confused by what it means exactly to have phenomenological experiences, I suggest reading Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat'.

>>9063155
but im saying in a world exactly like this but without qualia supposedly - p-world - wouldn't a zombie be asking the exact same questions "why is it like to feel?"; spurting it out of its cognitive circuits, given that it still has things like metacognition and is actively representing the world? And then that's a paradox kind of?

I build a Turing Machine simulator of a human brain? Is it conscious?

I run this simulator at 1/1000th normal speed. Is it conscious?

>>9063155
>just happen in the dark without a phenomenological subject that experiences it.

can you clarify what you mean by that?

>>9058348
If anyone listens to this guy, they're basically a fedora tipping idiot

>>9063171
It depends what kind of role you give to qualia. If qualia have causal influences over the physical, then you're going to find the p-world different.

Epiphnenomenalism runs into this problem, which says that qualia is there, but doesn't affect anything. If epiphenomenalism is true, it would seem like we shouldn't even be able to talk about problems of consciousness.

>>9063205
well i dont see how qualia can have a causal role of itself unless it has its own set of neurons specially designated as qualia neurons which i wouldn't have.

My conclusion is the opposite that qualia is just a logical consequence of representation.

What's wrong with thinking that consciousness is functionalist?

>>9063404
There's nothing wrong with it, but most people who pursue functionalism end up giving up on it due to the extreme carpal tunnel syndrome they experience from all the hand waving.

>>9063438
Just admit that consciousness is simply just a part of our brains and move on. I don't know why people make it so important.

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Functionalists are crypto-panpsychists

>>9063442
That mindset outright dismisses studying all the interesting properties of consciousness in favour of a half baked belief

>>9063442
That's fine if your goal isn't understanding but when your goal IS understanding that's poor.

>>9063453
>interesting properties

Which are?

>>9063442
>Just admit that Earth is the center of the universe and move on.

>>9063459
There is more to learn about astronomy than there is to neuroscience. We know more about how the brain works than we do about things past our solar system. One day we will know everything about the brain and we'll come to the inevitable conclusion that conscious is functionalist in nature

>>9063524
>one day when we know everything it'll prove I'm right

>>9063635
Why wouldn't I be right? I have yet to read anything that totally refutes functionalism. Most of the time it's people saying "edgelord"

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functionalists BTFO by the ashkenazi phenotype

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUW7n_h7MvQ

>>9063644
>dude consciousness is the totally odd thing we will never fully understand

Pathetic

>>9063457
Being able to ask whether there are interesting properties of consciousness?

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>>9063656
>he's jealous that he doesn't have the phenotype

>>9063677
>responding to stimuli and utilizing communication is an interesting property of consciousness

Oh wow. Face it, our consciousness does nothing that our brains do. My brain reads your post, interprets the information and sends signals to my fingers to make a response. My consciousness has nothing to do with it.

>>9063692
So what do you stand to gain by replying to me?

>>9063710
I am a petty animal.

>>9063715
Is petty a quality that can really be ascribed to the brain or body?

>>9063457
>tfw you realize some people are so used to their consciousness that they take it for granted

>>9063643
Which arguments have you read?

>>9063717
It describes a series of behaviors, behaviors that I act out. So yes you can.

>>9063644
His views are so reductionist it's baffling. Why do physicists have such a hard time understanding that systems science is the future of cognitive science, while reduction to physics is a horrible approach to studying consciousness? I suppose that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

>qualia experience themselves, lol what hard problem?
no wonder people turn to religion

>>9063183
Imagine yourself as just a bunch of particles interacting with each other. While there emerges complex behavior out of these interactions, the interactions shouldn't amount to anything other than behavior, according to science. With this view, then it shouldn't be possible for you to have a first person perspective, to "feel things" from the inside. It should all just behave "in the dark" without anyone there. Since things aren't happening in the dark, science must be missing something. You could disagree that things aren't happening in the dark, but in my view that would be going against the strongest empirical evidence anyone could ever have about anything - our own subjective experiences.

>>9065020
>the interactions shouldn't amount to anything other than behavior
I'm not the same anon, but would you mind clarifying this point. Do you mean the emergent system is determined by the interactions?

>>9063644
holy shit his voice

>>9065026
Yeah, I'd say so.
In simple terms what it means is that particles just follow rules; things just behave in certain patterns, and that's that. This is the scientific view of how the world works. With consciousness, there seems to be more than just things behaving. Behavior doesn't seem to account for our first person experiences.

>>9063172
So, would a computer programmed to simulate a human brain have phenomenal experience? If it is functionally identical, then why not? Well, first of all, it being functionally identical might not matter since the very gap at the heart of the hard problem is between function and experience. The computer could function identically but still lack phenomenal experience. But why would it lack it? Well, you could argue that the physical substrate where consciousness resides is affected/created differently when a system operates in the incredibly parallell way a brain does, as opposed to the fast repetitive symbol shuffling that happens in a single place in the CPU. Thus, the nature of the experience is not governed by the functional outcome of a system, but instead on how the system came to a functional outcome.

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Every so often I think I'll come to /sci/ to see if there's anything good, and all I ever find is basic calculus questions and garbage like this thread, full of idiots completely blind to their own philosophical presuppositions. What a board.

>>9066235
Well I'm glad you made the state of /sci/ better by contributing with this very thought provoking post, buddy.

>>9066357
You people will never learn

>>9066235
.t brainlet

People still think they understand consciousness, yet no self-aware A.I. has been produced.
Is awareness a pattern of electrical signals? What pattern?
How can a bunch of disjointed entities form the unified experience of awareness? Surely, one must consider the electromagnetic field of the brain as a potential physical structure to awareness, as it could be whole, but we see that this idea falls flat.

>>9066585
awareness is simply representation.

>>9066235
Better than /pol/

>>9058348
no ones answered back on my statement that qualia is a logical necessity of the brain.

>>9066698
Then what is the physicality of awareness?

>>9066780
neuronal mapping to the outside world.

>>9066778
Where is your argument?

>>9066982
p-zombies in a world theoretically without qualia would still ask "why does it feel how it feels?", assuming a monist view and one where qualia directly map to and are causally dependent on the brain

>>9066983
Your premise seems contradictory. In your p-zombie world, there necessarily isn't any qualia, so qualia can't cause anything to happen. "Why does it feel how it feels" necessarily must have purely physical causes in that world, as well as our world, if we presuppose that Epiphenomenalism is true, the view that the physical can influence the mental, but the mental can't influence the physical.

The original p-zombie argument is useful for honing in on what kind of consciousness we are talking about, but we don't have to assume this is how it would always work. We can imagine different p-zombie worlds where some form of Interactionism (mental can causally influence the physical and vice versa) is true, where you have zombies who are not behaviorally indistinguishable.

>>9066983
>>9067033
Also, it is not automatically the case that just because someone says "Why do I have qualia", "There is a hard problem!", "Why does it feel how it feels", that they actually have qualia. You can program a computer to utter those sentences, it doesn't mean it actually feels like anything for it. It therefore only assumes that the way we talk about qualia is purely caused by the brain, not the qualia itself.

>>9067033
no, qualia wouldnt cause anything to happen. i believe in a monist world. and im saying that qualia or not, our physical processes in the brain would still result in p-zombies asking the same questions we are now. yes my assumption is a monist one. and given this assumption, my argument is sound?

>>9067052
yes, but functionally they have qualia. theres no meaningful way to dissociate a world without qualia and a world with. and i actually contend that a representational machine like a brain can even represent something without some sort of "feeling" which is the point im trying to get at. qualia in a sense is a nonsense concept and i think maybe we assume this problem of qualia because it is so rich.

>>9067052
>You can program a computer to utter those sentences

but why did the program say it? yes you can program a computer to say it. but why? why do we say it? because we represent our environment. there is no way qualia can make sense without postulating some form of dualism in which qualia doesn't map to the brain.

we oft assume that qualia is some special weird thing that needs explanation, but wouldn't it be somewhat weirder if a complex system that represent's itself and its environment doesn't "feel" something?

i think the qualia confusion is based on a misconception about the difference between mental and physical and also a component of the idea that all observations are theory laden; i.e. every observation or theory is contextualised. and if we go on recursion, this ultimately leads to the contextualisation of all knowledge in the mind and the senses that compose the mind.

>>9067104
*pokes eye with knife*
"Ouch! That hurts!"
"Dude, that's like, an assumption."

>>9067123
huh?

>>9067098
>>9067104
Qualia necessitates that it's not about functions, it's about feeling things from a first person phenomenal perspective. There is no such thing as "functionally having qualia", there's only "appearing to have qualia".

Monism doesn't necessarily say anything about the possibility of qualia. Monism is only a statement on how many kinds of stuff things are fundamentally made of. Physicalism is one type of monism, where qualia have no place. There are other types of monism where qualia can have a place.

>we oft assume that qualia is some special weird thing that needs explanation, but wouldn't it be somewhat weirder if a complex system that represent's itself and its environment doesn't "feel" something?
If I was to adopt a completely physicalist view, I would have no problem accounting for behavior without any feelings. The way physicalism accounts for the world, it seems like it makes no place for feelings in the qualitative phenomenal sense; you have to either eliminate them, or change the definition to be completely functional, to the point where it's meaningless to even call it a feeling anymore, which effectively is elimination as well.

>>9067166
you aren't even giving these feelings a definition though.

my view, and ill keep saying it so you dont have to expand upon these other types of views, is that are first person experience is from our brains and directly maps to it as you can see from lesion studies. there is no other reason to postulate any other substances or any other special mechanism for qualia. im saying that qualia is a necessity because if it is a product of brain processes, then the idea of the p-zombie is incoherent. a organism that has a brain like ours necessarily has to have qualia like ours or expresses a feeling in the sense that it represents and perceives the world and itself and so has to have feelings.
im not arguing for a world without feelings. im arguing for a physicalist world that necessitates feelings and that we have this weird construal of qualia vs. science when infact both are perceived through a veil of indirect realism and our own egocentrism. im not changing any definitions. im just saying there isn't a massive problem with qualia beyond the fact that there is a massive epistemological problem in general and all knowledge has to be contextualised which taken to its extreme.. is contextualised in our own mind and our sense of the world - our experience. objectivity is illusory and we have no way of even conceptualising mind-independent generative models to relate qualia too because of this veil of indirect realism.

>>9067184
relate qualia to*

the problem of qualia is underdetermined and irrevocably ill-posed and i reckon, to the point of nonsenseness.

>>9067166
also, i say that you can functionally have qualia for the sake of argument or atleast the paradox that something may say "why do i feel like this?" with or without the assumption of a first person experience of qualia

>>9067166
infact, i think that when looking at the world from a first person perspective where science and cognition is about inferring generative models of data, the postulation that there is a problematic link between qualia and the "real world" becomes untenable because it becomes meaningless. with the p-zombie example, if you reject that we necessarily have qualia you pose an arbitrariness on when or why something has qualia which is to the effect of dualism which has no grounds to stand on. i think with qualia we confuse an epistomological problem with an ontological one.

>>9067184
I've stated my definition of a feeling. For something to be a feeling it doesn't only need to cognitively have inputs and computationally react to stimuli, it actually has to feel like something to be that entity from the inside. You say that this feeling is all explained and account for by the inputs and the computations, but I say that with just the inputs and computations, there is something missing. I find this distinction between function and experience to be critical, and I guess here it comes down to a disagreement where we can never convince each other.

>>9067166
we take for granted that the concrete scientific world we see as objective is contextualised in the very qualia we perceive as divorced from it. there is no objectivity, only intersubjectivity for the sake of science.

>>9067166
rather than asking "what it feels like to be a bat?" we should be asking, "what does a mind-independent object look like?". for me, this highlights what the real issue is.

>>9067208
but all the information for the feeling is present is it not? this idea of inputs and computations is not contextually isolated or divorced from our qualia or "feelings" either. these concepts can only be expressed within the "feelings" we have. They are both viewed from the same side of the coin though we perceive them as opposed. the real issue is indirect realism and the ill-posed problem of inferring contextually independent generative models which at its extremes is impossible since we cannot express objective ideas mind-independently and data can be explained in multiple different ways. how can we postulate the difference between qualia and scientific explanations when they are not independent constructs. we just think they are. its an illusory dualism. all we have is the feeling inside. there is nothing else. your models of the brain and neuroscience cannot be explained outside of the context of "feeling". there is no true distinction. its only possible to communicate certain concepts but they are still not contextually objective.

Theres nothing about consciousness that cannot be explained by physics, chem, biology, neuroscience ,neural networks and turing machines.

What you call 'qualia' is a mere emergent product of this machine called brain.

The problem is the huge dimensionality, how you could describe emergent properties of 10 billon neurons, we need more computational power. But you can understand it by an analogous, a complex algorithm like a self driving car, cannot be "explained" explicitly how it works not even by the developer, but we dont define some sort of magical qualia to explain why the fuck the thing drives for itself.

>>9067208
if a person says he feels, who are you to doubt that he feels if he has all the machinery in him to feel and can perceive all the nuances that you can? if he can distinguish everything you can, if his brain works in the same way under functional integration in the exact same way it is necessary for you to have feeling. feeling is a necessity of mere representation and their integration to model the world as an animal would.

>>9067240
But no one is asking how it could be that a self driving car can drive by itself. The same is true for humans: The contemporary philosophical debate on consciousness (at least when it comes to the hard problem) has nothing to do with how things behave.

>>9067240
this gets a (you)

>>9067248
>if a person says he feels, who are you to doubt that he feels if he has all the machinery in him to feel and can perceive all the nuances that you can?

Because I disagree that it's just the function of the machinery in him that makes him feel.

I'm not completely opposed to the idea that identical function = identical experience, but I don't think this is necessarily correct, and I deny that the function itself IS the experience. See >>9066200

>>9067251
The hard problem is why and how we have qualia. To explain that you would need to explain how the brain behaves.

>>9067264
But it seems like person A can behave identically to person B, yet person A lacks qualia. Just behavioral explanations can't account for this.

>>9067261
then you are a dualist. i think the function is the experience so to say. our disbelief is just at the richness of it. the brain is the most complex thing in the universe. for all intents and purposes, you believe in god.

>>9067269
How could you prove A lacks qualia?

>>9067251
but you can't dismiss how things behave since it is fundamentally entwined in qualia... or else you are a dualist. its like trying to completely dissociate explanations for socioeconomic status and iq when they cant be dissociated because they interact.

>>9067269
this depends on whether your statement is even valid which it may not be. maybe rephrase it through "with or without the assumption that he has qualia"

>>9067279
The only thing I can prove (to myself) is that I have qualia, and that I don't know if other people have qualia. From this I can infer that whether something has qualia or not can't be deduced from the way he acts.

The thought experiment necessitates that person A lacks it, I don't have to prove it. You can of course disagree with the premises of the experiment, but not that.

>>9067294

If A and B behaves exactly and by any measurement or property that we can experience they are the same, then qualia defines absolutely nothing in reality. Thinking on things beyond us makes no sense if they dont effect in our reality

>>9067294
this is incredibly solipsistic which is very problematic. for some people e.g. those whove had brain injuries, they may be able to deduce a relationship between qualia and the brain from their own experience. i think that though no you cant prove (yes, an epistemological problem like i said), it becomes untenable to just dissociate behaviour and qualia because behaviour is intrinsically related to cognition which is intrinsically related to neurobiology and qualia under some assumptions of monism and under the experiences of certain types if people with brain injuries. yes we may not be able to prove links of qualia and behaviour for the same reasons that we can't mind read or look inside someones head, but you cant deny that there has to be a link on some level between cognition and qualia. and the link of behaviour and qualia is just a non-linear product of that.

>>9067275
>>9067290
Yeah, I'm not opposed to dualism, but I'm not entirely sold on it either. As I said, you can incorporate my view of qualia in a monistic framework. Dualism simply says that the mental and the physical are made of two different kinds of stuff. A monist could for example say the world is neither mental nor physical, but made of a more fundamental kind of stuff that only seem to be two different things, and science only sees one of them.

>>9067310
i dont think it makes sense to say that they are made of two types of stuff. we view "physical & mental" things through the same veneer. theres no reason for dualism i think. its arbitrary.

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>>9067240
>emergent product

I found it.... I found the hand wave!

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Functionalism == Dualism

This seems like an odd statement, but once you realize this fact you can move on to a proper discussion about consciousness.

>>9067625

can you elaborte?

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>mfw people unironically believe intentionality is a real problem that challenges physicalism

>>9058486
neurons don't work like water pipes

>>9069260
1 water pipe wouldn't equal 1 neuron. But you can imagine building say a complex setup of 1000 (or as many as needed) water pipes, as well as other mechanical part to manipulate the water, to functionally represent 1 neuron. If you can represent 1 neuron, then you can represent all of them.

>>9069253
>Outcome A

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>>9069253
>mfw people over the ages attempt to challenge physicalism

It's like watching some child try to take on Muhammad Ali

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>>9069253
>when he thinks the problem of intentionality has anything to do with the hard problem of consciousness

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If the Earth, as Tesla says, is a giant brain, is it conscious?

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>>9069825
>when he thinks this thread is specifically about the hard problem of consciousness, and not explaining consciousness in general

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>>9070187
>when hes OP and gets to decide what the thread is about

>>9069825
>goodfell
i recognize your gif
im onto u

>consciousness is supernatural!!!
>*ignores that almost every part of your consciousness is changed by what chemicals you've ingested, how much oxygen your brain has, whether you've had head trauma,etc.*

consciousness is clearly a physical phenomenon

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>>9070241

>>9069270
can you illustrate how any number of water pipes could replicate the functionality of a neuron?

>>9070277
why is it so hard to imagine; all neuronal information is conveyed through on/off firing. im sure it would be difficult and complex but im sure its plausible

>>9070272
Define the "parts" of consciousness. Nevertheless I agree with you. I don't know how anyone could think of it as supernatural when it's so clearly affected by the physical world.

>>9070420
Supernatural is a stupid word, the correct word is immaterial.

Perception of X implies the perceiver is not X. Consciousness is perception of the material world, therefore consciousness is not material.

>>9070439
>Perception of X implies the perceiver is not X
>implying

It still exists in the material world and is affected by material things. It's material.

>>9070420
>>9070272
>>9070441
You're making an error in your arguments. Let's look at it.

P1: The physical can affect the mental
P2: Since the physical can affect the mental, that means the mental is just physical.
C: Consciousness is entirely physical.

Clearly it doesn't follow that just because A can affect B, that A is B, or that A alone causes B. Otherwise you could say something like "Wind causes the wind turbine". The wind causes the wind turbine to spin, but it doesn't cause the wind turbine itself.

>>9070503
But both the wind turbine and the wind are physical things. According to you, we're saying something like "Beer causes consciousness." Obviously it doesn't, we're saying that the beer affects consciousness because consciousness is physical and is affected by physical things.

>>9070517
That's implying something has to be physical to be affected by physical things.

>>9070520
List me something that isn't physical that is affected by physical objects.

>>9070525
Consciousness :^)

>>9070525
emotions

>>9070526
wow m8 u sure showed me :D

>>9070528
Chemicals in the brain.

>>9070530
yea your emotions are affected by those physical neurotransmitters, but "hate" and "love" are not tangible physical objects

>>9070533
or you can do the opposite, a physical object being affected by a non physical, ie, your emotional state affects your brain chemistry, and vice versa

>>9070530
The mystery is not about explaining the behavior of the brain. That's not what I mean when I say consciousness. See >>9060083 and >>9060087