How important are dictionaries?

RatDog
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How important are dictionaries?

Language changes over time.  The English we speak now isn't the same as the English we spoke 100 years ago.   Language varies over regions.  English is not quite the same in England, Australia, and the United States because we have different dialects.  It's probably impossible to stop language from changing.  I'm not even sure it would be a good think if we could stop it.  

The question I'm asking myself right now is what should be done when people disagree about the meaning of a word.  Should dictionaries always be the final authority on what a word means?  If so which dictionary has the most authority?  Can people in a discussion simple agree with each other on a specific set of definitions?  What happens when people can't agree?  Is there any point to having an argument over what the proper definition of certain words should be?  Every argument I've seen about definition on this site seemed utterly pointless.  

The world is more connected now then at any other point in history.  People from all over the world can connect with each other online.  I wonder what affect this connection will have on language.  I wonder if dictionaries will become more important or less.  

 

 

 


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bennyboy wrote:Okay, here's

bennyboy wrote:

Okay, here's an example I'm curious what you guys think about.  I was involved in a long argument about sentience: what is it, is it material, etc.  I was arguing that sentience is experiential, and that the physical mechanism was irrelevant to the experience (exept for possibly causing it).  Some guy came along and "corrected" me.  He informed me that since there's no way to prove feeling in anyone, it's necessary to define it in terms of information processing.  "BS," quoth I, "Sentience comes from a root meaning 'feeling.'  No definition can work unless it involves someone/thing experiencing."  He got angry and came up with the: "While, meanings change and this is the only definition that makes sense according to science."

This offends me.  I know that science uses a material view.  I know that many people view consciousness as a purely material process.  But to take the feeling out of a word that means "feeling" seems a bit 1984 to me.  Better just to relegate the word to the trash heap and make a new word, I think.  Anyone else?

I agree with your defintition of sentience for the most part.  I would say that sentience is the ablity to experience or feel.  I view consciousness as a purely physical process, but I have no problems with defining senience that way.  I feel this way because the word sentience convays a concept that is useful to me, and if I didn't have that word I would have to make up another word to convey the same concepts.  

I disagree with what the guy said about their being no proof people have feelings.  My philosphy on how people know things is a form of pragmatism were truth and knowledge are judged by their ability to make predictions.  The idea that people are sentient allows me to better predict their behavior, and that ability to predict justifies my claim that other people are sentient.  I know that I myself am sentient because I experience things.  

 

 


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bennyboy wrote:Okay, here's

bennyboy wrote:

Okay, here's an example I'm curious what you guys think about.  I was involved in a long argument about sentience: what is it, is it material, etc.  I was arguing that sentience is experiential, and that the physical mechanism was irrelevant to the experience (exept for possibly causing it).  Some guy came along and "corrected" me.  He informed me that since there's no way to prove feeling in anyone, it's necessary to define it in terms of information processing.  "BS," quoth I, "Sentience comes from a root meaning 'feeling.'  No definition can work unless it involves someone/thing experiencing."  He got angry and came up with the: "While, meanings change and this is the only definition that makes sense according to science."

This offends me.  I know that science uses a material view.  I know that many people view consciousness as a purely material process.  But to take the feeling out of a word that means "feeling" seems a bit 1984 to me.  Better just to relegate the word to the trash heap and make a new word, I think.  Anyone else?

Well... watch where you point that comment, it's freaking loaded!

There are a few arguments in what you just wrote, but to stick with the thread, you're correct.  In that I mean, if two exoscientists are trying to agree on what would constitute as sentient life elsewhere, then his definition is relevant because you need to bring the definition to the lowest common denominator.  If you're arguing about human sentience and the mechanics of it, the lowest common denominator has no relevance due to the fact that we have already established what 'sentience' or sapience we're referring to.  Reducing it to the absurd minimum is being obtuse and not relevant to the discussion.

That being said, you should create a thread here regarding sentience or empiricism vs rationalism , I would like to discuss that with the likes of TG and Bob, and maybe we can all successfully ignore Jean.

Edit: mistype.

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bennyboy wrote:Okay, here's

bennyboy wrote:

Okay, here's an example I'm curious what you guys think about.  I was involved in a long argument about sentience: what is it, is it material, etc.  I was arguing that sentience is experiential, and that the physical mechanism was irrelevant to the experience (exept for possibly causing it).  Some guy came along and "corrected" me.  He informed me that since there's no way to prove feeling in anyone, it's necessary to define it in terms of information processing.  "BS," quoth I, "Sentience comes from a root meaning 'feeling.'  No definition can work unless it involves someone/thing experiencing."  He got angry and came up with the: "While, meanings change and this is the only definition that makes sense according to science."

This offends me.  I know that science uses a material view.  I know that many people view consciousness as a purely material process.  But to take the feeling out of a word that means "feeling" seems a bit 1984 to me.  Better just to relegate the word to the trash heap and make a new word, I think.  Anyone else?

As to feeling and perception. Experience is often used with the concept of consciousness.  We do have sensations, feeling and perceptions that does not reach a conscious level or comes and goes within consciousness.  If you have a wound in your arm the pain is there constantly. You may think that it comes and goes but that is simply your attention of it. Are you constantly aware of that terrible headache? Nope.  But the pain is still being processed without consciousness.  When you drive and you are talking to your passenger.  You still had perseption and processed those two or three stops signs and red lights but you were only conscious of the conversation perhaps. You do not remember that particular stop.  You have driven the route so many times you did not need to had your attention on all of the functions to "intend" your goal. From what I have seen of the neural correlates of consciousness there will be some type of activities in the neurons of the brain ( dendrites and axions as well) if there is any perception or experience whether conscious or not. The phenomenon of blind sight is an example. An area of the brain is damaged that allows the visual experience to go to the area of the brain that processes. While the eyes and optic nerve are functioning as well as V1 ( primary visual cortex). Yet along th path to the IT ( interior temporal cortex) is an interruption. The patient can not see. What is interesting if you say lets intuit. They will actually reach out for a cup placed somewhere in front of them as though they saw where it is located or catch a thrown ball. The visual processing is occurring in an non-conscious area. The processes are not sent to the area where consciousness functions and combines the various information sent to it. 

I hav a theory from split brian studies that there may be multiple conscious  events in the brain at one time with our general consciousness unaware of these other entities or events.  When there is two much seizure in some epileptics the bridge between the right and left hemispheres of the brain can be cut reducing or curtailing the seizures.

The right eye is connected to the left side of the brain and the left eye to to the right. If i were to put something in front of the subjects right eye and hold a comb in front of her she would be able to act out combing but not use the word.  If I do the same thing to the left eye she can say comb but not describe what it is used for. What we think of as the "I" of consciousness, the "Me"is the combining of these processes of information ( conscious states  that are separate) into one unified experience.  A comb brushes the hair.

Other examples of split brain studies present a woman whose right brain loved a dress but her left brain hated it ( wonder where we get those indecisions from they battle it out).  V. S. Ramachandran has an example where the right side was taught to answer yes not questions. When asked the right brain of the subject believed in god and the left side did not.   For you theists will the right brain consciousness go to heaven and the left side go to hell? Just curious?

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Hi TG

Hi TG,

It's always something, often not admitted. But just like Brian, you "left" (never of) Christianity because of your son's bone marrow issues. Thus another example of an emotional reaction.

I end up finding these emotional reactions when not directing discussing it. So once again, you denied the Trinity not because of the Trinity, but once again because of the "problem of evil."

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).

A Rational Christian of Intelligence (rare)with a valid and sound justification for my epistemology and a logical refutation for those with logical fallacies and false worldviews upon their normative of thinking in retrospect to objective normative(s). This is only understood via the imago dei in which we all are.

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).


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Jean Chauvin wrote:Hi

Jean Chauvin wrote:

Hi TG,

It's always something, often not admitted. But just like Brian, you "left" (never of) Christianity because of your son's bone marrow issues. Thus another example of an emotional reaction.

I end up finding these emotional reactions when not directing discussing it. So once again, you denied the Trinity not because of the Trinity, but once again because of the "problem of evil."

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).

Then you are completely messed up. My sons are fine. You aren't really reading our posts are you?  You just wanna start trouble and emotional upheaval. I have acute lukemia and just got out of the hospital a couple a weeks ago after being there for 6 weeks. Where have you been? Don't you care? I left Christianity long before my lukemia.  Again you miss the point about the trinity or did not read it. It is simply a late development and has no historical basis about Jesus. I think I indicated that it was a historical and critical analysis of  especially the gospels.  Logos Christology is a  development that was applied to Jesus just as the trinity heresy. 


 

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bennyboy wrote:Okay, here's

bennyboy wrote:

Okay, here's an example I'm curious what you guys think about.  I was involved in a long argument about sentience: what is it, is it material, etc.  I was arguing that sentience is experiential, and that the physical mechanism was irrelevant to the experience (exept for possibly causing it).  Some guy came along and "corrected" me.  He informed me that since there's no way to prove feeling in anyone, it's necessary to define it in terms of information processing.  "BS," quoth I, "Sentience comes from a root meaning 'feeling.'  No definition can work unless it involves someone/thing experiencing."  He got angry and came up with the: "While, meanings change and this is the only definition that makes sense according to science."

This offends me.  I know that science uses a material view.  I know that many people view consciousness as a purely material process.  But to take the feeling out of a word that means "feeling" seems a bit 1984 to me.  Better just to relegate the word to the trash heap and make a new word, I think.  Anyone else?

'Purely material process' is not quite coherent. Processes are totally dependent on matter, or some analogue of matter in whatever 'realm' or higher dimensional 'reality' one imagines. But a 'process' is not a material thing in itself.

Sentience is a product of a complex process which takes place on an extremely complex material structure. It is not a 'material' thing, it is a bit like a subtle attribute of a certain category of material things. Complex, persistent structure, necessary for such complex processes to 'run', are totally reliant on matter particles.

Sentience is totally dependent on the specific organization of that material structure. Saying that structure 'causes' sentience doesn't really describe the way sentience relates to the structure. It would be better described as an emergent property of that structure. It is totally dependent on the physical mechanism, in the same way that our communication here is totally dependent on the structure of the electronic devices we are using.

Science can now increasingly tie 'feelings' to processes in the brain, by correlating the verbal reports of a person with observations of those processes.

The programs running on those devices are not material entities, they are abstractions, patterns, which can be totally described and specified in various ways, such as printed words, patterns of pits or colors on a plastic disk, or of magnetization on a spinning magnetic disk, etc. But until the state of a certain sort of 'mechanism' is configured according to that pattern, and the process is initiated, they are not manifest. Consciousness, feeling, awareness, are analogous, but more subtle, of course. 'Information' is indeed the basis of such processes and patterns/abstractions, in somewhat the same way that atoms and their properties are the basis of the physical structure of DNA molecules.

Science can study anything which is manifest to us in any vaguely consistent and detectable way. It is simply observation and testing, done within a systematic, logical framework of checking and correlation with as many other independent but relevant observations and tests, which are then used to form hypothesis which propose underlying relationships between various observed phenomena. The only things it cannot investigate are those which cannot be detected in any way, which do not affect physical objects, energy flows, or our minds.

It is not a 'material' view, it is a 'natural' view.

Meanings do indeed change. The meanings of words are related to their etymology, but not constrained by it - it is how they are currently used that defines their meaning.

I might not describe things exactly the way that guy did, but I think I would pretty much agree with him.

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Hi TG

Hi TG,

Okay, so you denied the Trinity because it was a late development and was heresy? What? Have you heard of LSD 25. It's a CIA form of LSD a 1000 Times more powerful then regular LSD.

Genesis 19:24 we see an example of how the Trinity works. In this instance we have the 1st and 2nd persons of the Trinty both using Yahveh. The Yahveh in heaven brings the fire to the Yahveh on earth to shoot the fire towards Sodom. There are dozens of examples in the TaNaK. Not sure what you mean by late development.

Yes, Heraclitus used the term Logos, but what Heraclitus meant by logos is not what John meant. John simply used the term for relation but poured in Biblical concepts. That's like saying Virgin Records is a late idea and is heresy because virgins aren't records.

There is some emotional reason to be an atheist. It's never intellectual.

The argument regarding the logos is very old 19th century and has been refuted and dealt with many times. We can continue to discuss it. I thought it was over sometime more complex vs. the logos.

Remember TG, terms don't determine concepts, rather concepts determine terms. That is where you made your first error.
 

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).

 

A Rational Christian of Intelligence (rare)with a valid and sound justification for my epistemology and a logical refutation for those with logical fallacies and false worldviews upon their normative of thinking in retrospect to objective normative(s). This is only understood via the imago dei in which we all are.

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).


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Jean Chauvin wrote:Hi

Jean Chauvin wrote:

Hi TG,

Okay, so you denied the Trinity because it was a late development and was heresy? What? Have you heard of LSD 25. It's a CIA form of LSD a 1000 Times more powerful then regular LSD.

Genesis 19:24 we see an example of how the Trinity works. In this instance we have the 1st and 2nd persons of the Trinty both using Yahveh. The Yahveh in heaven brings the fire to the Yahveh on earth to shoot the fire towards Sodom. There are dozens of examples in the TaNaK. Not sure what you mean by late development.

Yes, Heraclitus used the term Logos, but what Heraclitus meant by logos is not what John meant. John simply used the term for relation but poured in Biblical concepts. That's like saying Virgin Records is a late idea and is heresy because virgins aren't records.

There is some emotional reason to be an atheist. It's never intellectual.

The argument regarding the logos is very old 19th century and has been refuted and dealt with many times. We can continue to discuss it. I thought it was over sometime more complex vs. the logos.

Remember TG, terms don't determine concepts, rather concepts determine terms. That is where you made your first error.
 

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).

 

Wrong all LSD is deLysSergic Acid 25 ( the de before it means the molecule bends light to the left).  There are various qualities as to purity of what it is added to and strngth. Otherwise LSD is simply LSD. Lysergic acid on the other hand is in the ergot mold and grows on Heavenly Blue Morning Glory Seeds and dark breads which caused St. Anthony's Fire back during common ovens. The Sodom thing is anachronistic. Primitive idea of the court of heaven of which Satan is one in Job. 

Hereclitus used the term very weakly. But if you follow Stoic development and look at Philo of Alexandria the term is causative of superstitious people projecting divinity into a story or person. So the Johannine literature reflects the areas speculation and intensification of the hymns we find in Paul.  The Jerusalem Pillars and Jesus would roll over in his grave to see what blasphemy was done in the name of a apocalyptic movement.  Paul certainly did not help. And then the second and third century Neo-Platonists really went off the deep end with the trinity.  John and James remained faithful to the original concept of the movement and we see the Ebionites until the early 2nd century maintaining the original Jesus movement.

 

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TGBaker wrote:Jean Chauvin

TGBaker wrote:

Jean Chauvin wrote:

Hi TG,

Okay, so you denied the Trinity because it was a late development and was heresy? What? Have you heard of LSD 25. It's a CIA form of LSD a 1000 Times more powerful then regular LSD.

Genesis 19:24 we see an example of how the Trinity works. In this instance we have the 1st and 2nd persons of the Trinty both using Yahveh. The Yahveh in heaven brings the fire to the Yahveh on earth to shoot the fire towards Sodom. There are dozens of examples in the TaNaK. Not sure what you mean by late development.

Yes, Heraclitus used the term Logos, but what Heraclitus meant by logos is not what John meant. John simply used the term for relation but poured in Biblical concepts. That's like saying Virgin Records is a late idea and is heresy because virgins aren't records.

There is some emotional reason to be an atheist. It's never intellectual.

The argument regarding the logos is very old 19th century and has been refuted and dealt with many times. We can continue to discuss it. I thought it was over sometime more complex vs. the logos.

Remember TG, terms don't determine concepts, rather concepts determine terms. That is where you made your first error.
 

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).

 

Wrong all LSD is deLysSergic Acid 25 ( the de before it means the molecule bends light to the left).  There are various qualities as to purity of what it is added to and strngth. Otherwise LSD is simply LSD. Lysergic acid on the other hand is in the ergot mold and grows on Heavenly Blue Morning Glory Seeds and dark breads which caused St. Anthony's Fire back during common ovens. The Sodom thing is anachronistic. Primitive idea of the court of heaven of which Satan is one in Job. 

Hereclitus used the term Logos very weakly. But if you follow Stoic development and look at Philo of Alexandria the term is causative of superstitious people projecting divinity into a story or person. The argument is earlier than 19th century. It goes back to the 2nd century and continues today despite the comfort of your systems scholars and orthodox conclusions. So the Johannine literature reflects the areas speculation and intensification of the hymns we find in Paul.  The Jerusalem Pillars and Jesus would roll over in his grave to see what blasphemy was done in the name of a apocalyptic movement.  Paul certainly did not help. And then the second and third century Neo-Platonists really went off the deep end with the trinity.  John and James remained faithful to the original concept of the movement and we see the Ebionites until the early 2nd century maintaining the original Jesus movement.

Certainly concepts are presented by terms but a term is such that it my be a vessel for different or related concepts from one community to another.   So the concept is determined by the term's context as for as exegesis.  Again you must keep eye to the diachronic as well as synchronic.

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bennyboy wrote:Okay, here's

bennyboy wrote:

Okay, here's an example I'm curious what you guys think about.  I was involved in a long argument about sentience: what is it, is it material, etc.  I was arguing that sentience is experiential, and that the physical mechanism was irrelevant to the experience (exept for possibly causing it).  Some guy came along and "corrected" me.  He informed me that since there's no way to prove feeling in anyone, it's necessary to define it in terms of information processing.  "BS," quoth I, "Sentience comes from a root meaning 'feeling.'  No definition can work unless it involves someone/thing experiencing."  He got angry and came up with the: "While, meanings change and this is the only definition that makes sense according to science."

This offends me.  I know that science uses a material view.  I know that many people view consciousness as a purely material process.  But to take the feeling out of a word that means "feeling" seems a bit 1984 to me.  Better just to relegate the word to the trash heap and make a new word, I think.  Anyone else?

Well, the guy is simply wrong. That is not the only definition that makes sense according to science. Psychology and psychiatry for example, deal with the feeling aspect of people all the time. Are you feeling depressed? Anxious? Angry? Etc.

Furthermore, anaesthetics can only be judged based on how well they actually do their job, which is to prevent or supprress sensation. Yes, they do this through a chemical process that can be expressed in terms of modifications to an information processing system, but none of that matters if it doesn't actually stop people from experiencing pain.

Feelings are physical, there is no doubt. Ask a neuroscientist.

I suspect he was trying to argue against the use of 'feeling' and 'emotion' as justifications for truth, as in "Well, I have no evidence, but I 'feel' that my theory is right, therefore you must accept it as scientifically justified as true." It is true that 'feeling' is not a good justification for the truth of things, but that doesn't mean science has no accurate concepts of what feelings are, physically.

Either that or he was trying to argue against 'qualia', which are mystical mumbo-jumbo 'feelings' or sensations that are defined as non-physical, and hence science cannot investigate qualia. This stems from a philosophical argument from what I consider to be 'mysterians' who are enamoured with the idea that 'everything is ultimately mysterious and we can never really know anything about consciousness/sentience with science'. These people and their arguments are a waste of anyone's time, to put it mildly. But that doesn't mean that actual physical feelings do not exist or can't be studied by science.

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BobSpence1 wrote:'Purely

BobSpence1 wrote:

'Purely material process' is not quite coherent. Processes are totally dependent on matter, or some analogue of matter in whatever 'realm' or higher dimensional 'reality' one imagines. But a 'process' is not a material thing in itself.

Sentience is a product of a complex process which takes place on an extremely complex material structure. It is not a 'material' thing, it is a bit like a subtle attribute of a certain category of material things. Complex, persistent structure, necessary for such complex processes to 'run', are totally reliant on matter particles.

Sentience is totally dependent on the specific organization of that material structure. Saying that structure 'causes' sentience doesn't really describe the way sentience relates to the structure. It would be better described as an emergent property of that structure. It is totally dependent on the physical mechanism, in the same way that our communication here is totally dependent on the structure of the electronic devices we are using.

Science can now increasingly tie 'feelings' to processes in the brain, by correlating the verbal reports of a person with observations of those processes.

The programs running on those devices are not material entities, they are abstractions, patterns, which can be totally described and specified in various ways, such as printed words, patterns of pits or colors on a plastic disk, or of magnetization on a spinning magnetic disk, etc. But until the state of a certain sort of 'mechanism' is configured according to that pattern, and the process is initiated, they are not manifest. Consciousness, feeling, awareness, are analogous, but more subtle, of course. 'Information' is indeed the basis of such processes and patterns/abstractions, in somewhat the same way that atoms and their properties are the basis of the physical structure of DNA molecules.

Science can study anything which is manifest to us in any vaguely consistent and detectable way. It is simply observation and testing, done within a systematic, logical framework of checking and correlation with as many other independent but relevant observations and tests, which are then used to form hypothesis which propose underlying relationships between various observed phenomena. The only things it cannot investigate are those which cannot be detected in any way, which do not affect physical objects, energy flows, or our minds.

It is not a 'material' view, it is a 'natural' view.

Meanings do indeed change. The meanings of words are related to their etymology, but not constrained by it - it is how they are currently used that defines their meaning.

I might not describe things exactly the way that guy did, but I think I would pretty much agree with him.

Bob brings up an important point about the distinction (or in some people, the lack of distinction) between 'material', 'natural', and 'physical'. When Bob says that sentience is a process, which is 'not a material thing in itself', but then also says that 'processes are totally dependent on matter', it may sound strange, but he is not contradicting himself. Note that later he speaks of 'information', 'physical mechanisms', 'physical structure' and 'physical objects'.

The way I conceive of it is as a kind of hierarchy (actually more like a tree) which goes like this: Natural > Physical > Material. In this case, 'material' is referring specifically to matter/energy itself. The Physical encompasses the Material, but also includes 'non-material' things like forces, charges, quantum states, structures, space-time, and -- crucially -- information and processes. This view, which is what mainstream science substantiates and embraces, is called Physicalism. The wiki article is pretty good, and leads to more in-depth stuff, but you may find yourself caught up in tangential discussion of 'supervenience' and all that jazz.

I've got another post on the topic (which includes yet another video) on physicalism which attempts to cut through the jargon and wrap up physicalism into a practical tool to use/understand. It's for situations like these when people are trying to figure out the 'right' word for their view of what is often lamely called 'materialism': The word is: Physicalism

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I think materialism vs.

I think materialism vs. physicalism is mainly semantics.  Whether you say that a process is material, or to say that process are not material but are supervenient on material stuctures, is a pretty fine distinction when you're talking about things like sentience.  But I did try to pick a word for which everyone could see the need to debate.  My point really is that you have to just let a word mean what it means.  We use "sentience" to refer to the feeling of conscious awareness, and we recognize sentience in others, when we try to explain to them that we are agnostics and not agnostic atheists, by the way their brows furrow.

I think the last two posts are an example where a specific debate has gone deeper than most would take it (i.e. it's been through the wringer of academia), and you end up with two schools: those who are just thinking about thought, and use words in their mundane usage, and those who have necessarily refined definitions very sharply to allow them to debate subtleties (and do dissertations).

I think in general forums, the academics have the responsibility of trying to understand what level of usage people are using, and use a bit of the ol' Socrates methodology to guide them to the point where they need more precision-- THEN pull out the academic definitions.  In general, I think that's basically what people actually do, but sometimes the ad homs come a little quicker than the comprehension could.  So far, I'm happy the way Bob and you are introducing ideas here. Smiling


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bennyboy wrote:I think

bennyboy wrote:

I think materialism vs. physicalism is mainly semantics.  Whether you say that a process is material, or to say that process are not material but are supervenient on material stuctures, is a pretty fine distinction when you're talking about things like sentience.  But I did try to pick a word for which everyone could see the need to debate.  My point really is that you have to just let a word mean what it means.  We use "sentience" to refer to the feeling of conscious awareness, and we recognize sentience in others, when we try to explain to them that we are agnostics and not agnostic atheists, by the way their brows furrow.

I think the last two posts are an example where a specific debate has gone deeper than most would take it (i.e. it's been through the wringer of academia), and you end up with two schools: those who are just thinking about thought, and use words in their mundane usage, and those who have necessarily refined definitions very sharply to allow them to debate subtleties (and do dissertations).

I think in general forums, the academics have the responsibility of trying to understand what level of usage people are using, and use a bit of the ol' Socrates methodology to guide them to the point where they need more precision-- THEN pull out the academic definitions.  In general, I think that's basically what people actually do, but sometimes the ad homs come a little quicker than the comprehension could.  So far, I'm happy the way Bob and you are introducing ideas here. Smiling

I think once you put this in a category of consciousness studies you are in an unresolved field of study.  You have the one definitive position of David Chalmers that consciousness is not reducible and should be considered a fundamental physical law like other physics related forces. An you have dennett that simply calls consciousness an illusion and does a fair job of philosophizing it away.  The question still revolves around dualism vs monism, qualia and neuro correlates of consciousness.  This seems to be the area you wanna discuss if I am not wrong?????

 

All conscious experience has feeling somewhere in the nexus of its processing. It goes through the limbic system. Your "feeel" on that color is how it interest you, captivates you, makes you associate it with a happy warm sky, a peaceful forest or an angry blazing fire. Colors are used in teaching and hospital setting because of mood. Do not paint a room pink or orange. paint it soft green or blue. When someone says something you understand it through an unconscious processing of previous experience which entails various emotional memory experiences associated and stored with the ideas. Someone says a neutral word and a person might get upset from his stored associative feelings that contribute to the meaning and come up through the dorsel section of the stream of processing through the limbic system to an irritated thought. Say communist to an anti-communist or democrat to a republican.  Say angel or devil. These words as do all thoughts carry multilayer mental processing of the neo-cortex, cortex , limbic and even the r-complex.  A physicist will feel excitement with a new thought.  Does this help? This is called qualia in the study of consciousness.

Mary was born with complete color blindness. Yet she had an acute gray scale ability of discernment. She could usually tell a color by comparing one shade of gray with another. This was certainly a factor that led her to major in and devote her life to neuroscience. She was an expert in the area of the brain that processed color. She could tell you all about the color red in scientific detail and point it out when she say that particular gray shade of a rose. One day she dropped a book she was carrying on her walk to work. When she bent over to pick it up she was struck by a passing car. Surgery had to be done to the left side of her brain As the surgeon repaired her brain she also removed a small lesion near the area damaged by the accident. After several days Mary woke to a world of color. The first thing she saw was the dozen roses her boyfriend had brought. The first thing that Mary said was, “So that is red!”

What she experienced as red including feelings of happiness, satisfaction and surprize is the qualia in the conscious experience not reducible to shared experience and is the you-ness, I-ness, or me-ness of the experience.

 WIKI:

Qualia (play /ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/), singular "quale" (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkwaːle]), from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to describe subjective conscious experiences. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the redness of an evening sky. Daniel Dennett writes that qualia is "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us."[1] Erwin Schrödinger, the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take: "The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so." [2]

The importance of qualia in philosophy of mind comes largely from the fact that they are seen as posing a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the mind-body problem. Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition of the term that is used, as various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain features of qualia.

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

 

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 bennyboy wrote:Okay,

 

bennyboy wrote:
Okay, here's an example I'm curious what you guys think about. I was involved in a long argument about sentience: what is it, is it material, etc. I was arguing that sentience is experiential, and that the physical mechanism was irrelevant to the experience (exept for possibly causing it). Some guy came along and "corrected" me. He informed me that since there's no way to prove feeling in anyone, it's necessary to define it in terms of information processing. "BS," quoth I, "Sentience comes from a root meaning 'feeling.' No definition can work unless it involves someone/thing experiencing." He got angry and came up with the: "While, meanings change and this is the only definition that makes sense according to science."

 

This offends me. I know that science uses a material view. I know that many people view consciousness as a purely material process. But to take the feeling out of a word that means "feeling" seems a bit 1984 to me. Better just to relegate the word to the trash heap and make a new word, I think. Anyone else?

 

OK, I see what he did there and it really comes off as incoherent. I underlined the key bit to focus on that but the rest of the post provides the essential context.

 

What does he me by “the only definition that makes sense according to science”? I have seen a number of people pull that particular rabbit out of their arse over the years and it always fails to impress me.

 

Science is a process which develops and changes, it is not a snapshot of reality with no change permitted, nor is it something to be enshrined and held up as the unquestionable thing. Really, that is what theists do with their dusty old books.

 

Further, it does not even matter if any specific conception is even coherent or in agreement with any part of science, the conception itself would not be part of science apart from a very general sense which would be useless in such a context as this.

 

Really, I could hold to some conception which may or may not hold some traction in a discussion. There may be scientists working in a relevant area who are thinking along similar lines. However, as someone on the outside of the actual matter at hand, the conception which I would hold to would be that of a layman and as such, no science. Hell's bells but even if experiments were done that showed my idea to be quite accurate, that would not modify the fact that my idea was not, at the root of the matter, a scientific conjecture.

 

What would really be going on there would be that I was holding science up and claiming that what I had come up with in a non-scientific manner might be in some agreement with science. Which is really using science to justify my non-scientific opinion.

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TGBaker wrote:The first

TGBaker wrote:
The first thing that Mary said was, “So that is red!”

What she experienced as red including feelings of happiness, satisfaction and surprize is the qualia in the conscious experience not reducible to shared experience and is the you-ness, I-ness, or me-ness of the experience.

TG, I'm mildly curious as to whether you find the Mary's Room argument persuasive as to whether so-called qualia are non-physical and at the same time really existing.

BTW: Being 'not reducible to shared experience' a) doesn't disqualify something from being physical, depending on how you define shared experience or b) requires a meaningless definition of 'shared experience'.

The problem of qualia is an imaginary problem. We are steadily (in fact, increasingly rapidly) finding out more and more about how the physical brain represents everything from memory to meaning, and sensation to emotion. Once we discover the brain's concrete mechanisms for implementing consciousness, there will only be minor gaps to fill in our understanding.

The point is, eventually we will be able to identify 'the experience of red' in the brain, and once we do so, the mysterians will just say, "But that's just a representation! You may know everything there is to know about the physical brain's simulation of physical pseudo-consciousness, but you'll never be able to 'reduce' true qualia to that!"

And the neuroscientists will just go about their jobs, tinkering with the ways people consciously experience the world, and the mysterians will just keep on denying that science can understand consciousness.

The problem of qualia is exactly like the problem of phlogiston, of elan vital, of intelligent design, of homeopathy, of 'psychics', of prayer, etc. None of it has any practical impact on reality, except for the actions of those deluded by the ideas.


Edit: I just came up with a good way of putting this, right after I hit 'post'.

Basically, neuroscience has destroyed the idea of a unified 'soul'. So, philosophers aware of this destruction via neuroscience, but still desiring a soul to exist, invented 'qualia', the 'souls' of individual neurons.

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natural wrote:TGBaker

natural wrote:

TGBaker wrote:
The first thing that Mary said was, “So that is red!”

What she experienced as red including feelings of happiness, satisfaction and surprize is the qualia in the conscious experience not reducible to shared experience and is the you-ness, I-ness, or me-ness of the experience.

TG, I'm mildly curious as to whether you find the Mary's Room argument persuasive as to whether so-called qualia are non-physical and at the same time really existing.

BTW: Being 'not reducible to shared experience' a) doesn't disqualify something from being physical, depending on how you define shared experience or b) requires a meaningless definition of 'shared experience'.

The problem of qualia is an imaginary problem. We are steadily (in fact, increasingly rapidly) finding out more and more about how the physical brain represents everything from memory to meaning, and sensation to emotion. Once we discover the brain's concrete mechanisms for implementing consciousness, there will only be minor gaps to fill in our understanding.

The point is, eventually we will be able to identify 'the experience of red' in the brain, and once we do so, the mysterians will just say, "But that's just a representation! You may know everything there is to know about the physical brain's simulation of physical pseudo-consciousness, but you'll never be able to 'reduce' true qualia to that!"

And the neuroscientists will just go about their jobs, tinkering with the ways people consciously experience the world, and the mysterians will just keep on denying that science can understand consciousness.

The problem of qualia is exactly like the problem of phlogiston, of elan vital, of intelligent design, of homeopathy, of 'psychics', of prayer, etc. None of it has any practical impact on reality, except for the actions of those deluded by the ideas.


Edit: I just came up with a good way of putting this, right after I hit 'post'.

Basically, neuroscience has destroyed the idea of a unified 'soul'. So, philosophers aware of this destruction via neuroscience, but still desiring a soul to exist, invented 'qualia', the 'souls' of individual neurons.

No I assume qualia and consciousness are a physical phenomenon. And why would I assume that just because something is not reducible it is non-physical? That is why I threw David Chalmers into this mix.  Because consciousness is not reducibe to the functional level of NCC his work looks at a property dualism rather than anything Cartesian.  I do not think the actual causality of a baseball being hit by a bat is reducible. You certainly can reduce it to a quantum level but is it that the causality is upward from there or on the macro-level of the baseball game?  I think tit is on the same level of the meaningfulness of the process. I do not like the concept of emergence because of its misleading nature but I use it like Dennett or Chalmers for that matter. I do not think that qualia are imaginary phenomena however. I think that we are dealing with simply a mental language in this case color.  The real problem of consciousness is whether the qualia are conscious states or whether they are constituents of consciousness.  The question of qualia once you remove the mysterians and the spiritualist flavoring is precisely what the Mary problem shows.  We already can identify the experience of red and in some sense in the brain.(The synethesia experiments of Ramachandran and the visual areas above the dysfunction is where "red" and then in a lower area the word red resides in our brain).  The question really is what is experiencing the "red". As to the representation: "red" ultimately is a mental state that IS representative of the external causal agent to our senses.

Consciousness will be something like a property dualism in which material patterns are information agents in a similar sense as DNA.  The idea of consciousness being fundamental by Chalmers is speculative but nothing to do with anything spiritual or non-physical. The assumption in such research is that awareness is as simple as the "awareness" between two electron or quarks.  The type of neurological perception we see in complex organisms is not so much emergent as a "complexification" of that said awareness beyond presence, attraction or repulsion. I am enough of a pragmatist to think that the red you experience is the same as me since they are from a common evelutionary development and physical process.  Human consciousness may well be emergent or simply a recursive process in which red is a conscious state experienced by another frame of consciousness linguistically based as "I".  I think this is lacking in mice and cats, etc.;  But the problem of qualia is not like elan vital in that it is empirically a referent of which we speak but can not communicate since it is an internal private experience.

 

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TGBaker wrote:natural

TGBaker wrote:

natural wrote:

TGBaker wrote:
The first thing that Mary said was, “So that is red!”

What she experienced as red including feelings of happiness, satisfaction and surprize is the qualia in the conscious experience not reducible to shared experience and is the you-ness, I-ness, or me-ness of the experience.

TG, I'm mildly curious as to whether you find the Mary's Room argument persuasive as to whether so-called qualia are non-physical and at the same time really existing.

BTW: Being 'not reducible to shared experience' a) doesn't disqualify something from being physical, depending on how you define shared experience or b) requires a meaningless definition of 'shared experience'.

The problem of qualia is an imaginary problem. We are steadily (in fact, increasingly rapidly) finding out more and more about how the physical brain represents everything from memory to meaning, and sensation to emotion. Once we discover the brain's concrete mechanisms for implementing consciousness, there will only be minor gaps to fill in our understanding.

The point is, eventually we will be able to identify 'the experience of red' in the brain, and once we do so, the mysterians will just say, "But that's just a representation! You may know everything there is to know about the physical brain's simulation of physical pseudo-consciousness, but you'll never be able to 'reduce' true qualia to that!"

And the neuroscientists will just go about their jobs, tinkering with the ways people consciously experience the world, and the mysterians will just keep on denying that science can understand consciousness.

The problem of qualia is exactly like the problem of phlogiston, of elan vital, of intelligent design, of homeopathy, of 'psychics', of prayer, etc. None of it has any practical impact on reality, except for the actions of those deluded by the ideas.


Edit: I just came up with a good way of putting this, right after I hit 'post'.

Basically, neuroscience has destroyed the idea of a unified 'soul'. So, philosophers aware of this destruction via neuroscience, but still desiring a soul to exist, invented 'qualia', the 'souls' of individual neurons.

No I assume qualia and consciousness are a physical phenomenon. And why would I assume that just because something is not reducible it is non-physical? That is why I threw David Chalmers into this mix.  Because consciousness is not reducibe to the functional level of NCC his work looks at a property dualism rather than anything Cartesian.  I do not think the actual causality of a baseball being hit by a bat is reducible. You certainly can reduce it to a quantum level but is it that the causality is upward from there or on the macro-level of the baseball game?  I think tit is on the same level of the meaningfulness of the process. I do not like the concept of emergence because of its misleading nature but I use it like Dennett or Chalmers for that matter. I do not think that qualia are imaginary phenomena however. I think that we are dealing with simply a mental language in this case color.  The real problem of consciousness is whether the qualia are conscious states or whether they are constituents of consciousness.  The question of qualia once you remove the mysterians and the spiritualist flavoring is precisely what the Mary problem shows.  We already can identify the experience of red and in some sense in the brain.(The synethesia experiments of Ramachandran and the visual areas above the dysfunction is where "red" and then in a lower area the word red resides in our brain).  The question really is what is experiencing the "red". As to the representation: "red" ultimately is a mental state that IS representative of the external causal agent to our senses.

Consciousness will be something like a property dualism in which material patterns are information agents in a similar sense as DNA.  The idea of consciousness being fundamental by Chalmers is speculative but nothing to do with anything spiritual or non-physical. The assumption in such research is that awareness is as simple as the "awareness" between two electron or quarks.  The type of neurological perception we see in complex organisms is not so much emergent as a "complexification" of that said awareness beyond presence, attraction or repulsion. I am enough of a pragmatist to think that the red you experience is the same as me since they are from a common evelutionary development and physical process.  Human consciousness may well be emergent or simply a recursive process in which red is a conscious state experienced by another frame of consciousness linguistically based as "I".  I think this is lacking in mice and cats, etc.;  But the problem of qualia is not like elan vital in that it is empirically a referent of which we speak but can not communicate since it is an internal private experience. I agree with you that the supernaturalists are going after it with the loss of the "soul". But it is a simple process that may ultimately be the simple recursive loop that Hofstader writes so well about. I think we are close to talking about the same thing only different theories. Hope that helps with where I am at... is that PC enough I have my personal theories if ya would like to discuss yours. 

 


 

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Curious - how was it

Curious - how was it assessed that 'Mary' was color blind, if she could still distinguish between things of different color??

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BennyBoy"}My point really is

BennyBoy wrote:

My point really is that you have to just let a word mean what it means.

That is meaningless nonsense.

How do 'know' what a word 'just' means???

Wrt the OP, dictionaries are important as records of consensual usage.

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BobSpence1 wrote:Curious -

BobSpence1 wrote:

Curious - how was it assessed that 'Mary' was color blind, if she could still distinguish between things of different color??

The very good gray scale differentiation was learned as she aged. Such are thought experiments.

 

 EDIT: Oh by the way if she had been born with the acuity and apart from her acquiring her acuity over the years there would be no way to determine presently her experience of gray from your red since she would not be missing out as far as she knows and would have a good functional language game to communicate with you.

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TGBaker wrote:natural

TGBaker wrote:

natural wrote:

The problem of qualia is

exactly

like the problem of phlogiston, of

elan vital

, of intelligent design, of homeopathy, of 'psychics', of prayer, etc. None of it has any practical impact on reality, except for the actions of those deluded by the ideas.


Edit: I just came up with a good way of putting this, right after I hit 'post'.

Basically, neuroscience has destroyed the idea of a unified 'soul'. So, philosophers aware of this destruction via neuroscience, but still desiring a soul to exist, invented 'qualia', the 'souls' of individual neurons.

No I assume qualia and consciousness are a physical phenomenon. And why would I assume that just because something is not reducible it is non-physical? That is why I threw David Chalmers into this mix.

Chalmers is a git.

Quote:
  Because consciousness is not reducibe to the functional level of NCC his work looks at a property dualism rather than anything Cartesian.

I repeat: "The problem of qualia is exactly like the problem of phlogiston, of elan vital, ... etc."

Property dualism amounts to the claim that some properties are just mental and some are just physical. There's a mysterious 'mentalness' that cannot, I repeat, cannot be investigated by physics, because it is too mysterious. It is, but this distinction, defined as non-physical.

In exactly the same way that vitalists claim that some matter is just alive, and some matter just isn't. There's a mysterious 'aliveness' that cannot be detected physically, etc. etc.

There is zero evidence of property dualism, it's just mumbo jumbo.

The 'souls' of the neurons indeed.

Quote:
  I do not think the actual causality of a baseball being hit by a bat is reducible. You certainly can reduce it to a quantum level but is it that the causality is upward from there or on the macro-level of the baseball game?

Umm, I think you just answered your own question: It can be reduced to the quantum level. The end. The 'but' is irrelevant to reducibility. Causality is indeed an 'emergent' relationship based on the fact that macro-objects consist of ginormous amounts of quantum objects, making the whole thing an exercise in sums and averages: Statistical approximations of quantum systems. Thermodynamics.

Quote:
I do not think that qualia are imaginary phenomena however. I think that we are dealing with simply a mental language in this case color.  The real problem of consciousness is whether the qualia are conscious states or whether they are constituents of consciousness.  The question of qualia once you remove the mysterians and the spiritualist flavoring is precisely what the Mary problem shows.  We already can identify the experience of red and in some sense in the brain.(The synethesia experiments of Ramachandran and the visual areas above the dysfunction is where "red" and then in a lower area the word red resides in our brain).  The question really is what is experiencing the "red". As to the representation: "red" ultimately is a mental state that IS representative of the external causal agent to our senses.

All of which is to say that you don't agree with the mysterian definitions of qualia. In that case, the Mary problem is useless. The whole point of it is to show that there is 'something more' to experience than can be 'reduced' to physics. But the presentation of the 'problem' is so absurd. She reads books about physics, and the mysterians equate this to: 'Thus, she has all the physical knowledge of red you could possibly imagine'. Um, sorry, no. That's a bait and switch. Later, she sees a red rose and goes "Oh!" and we're supposed to be impressed that she has 'learned something new that cannot be 'reduced' to shared experience' whatever that means, which is never defined.

You say:

Quote:
The real problem of consciousness is whether the qualia are conscious states or whether they are constituents of consciousness.

How is that a 'problem' of consciousness in the 'hard' way? It is a minor detail, if qualia are acknowledged as physical.

It's like saying the 'real problem' of photosynthesis is whether the light energy is first stored in chlorophyll and then put to work to make sugars, or whether the light energy directly drives a chemical reaction using chlorophyll as a catalyst. Who fucking cares? The point is that no magic vital force is required when sugars are synthesized!

Likewise, if qualia are physical, who cares if they are 'states' or 'the process itself'? The point is that consciousness has a physical mechanism. Figuring out the nitty gritty details is neurologist's research problem, compared to the astounding fact that people like Chalmers (not to mention billions of theists) grasp desperately to hold on to their imaginary 'souls'.

Quote:
Consciousness will be something like a property dualism in which material patterns are information agents in a similar sense as DNA.

DNA does not require property dualism to do its job. Information is just information, there isn't 'life' information and there isn't 'mental' information. It's all just information. Informational structures build upon themselves, and you get complicated things like life happening, and even more complicated things like consciousness happening. No. Magic. Required.

Quote:
  The idea of consciousness being fundamental by Chalmers is speculative but nothing to do with anything spiritual or non-physical.

He would deny his non-physicalism, but if you actually listen to what he says and read what he writes, he defines entities in such ways that they are non-physical by definition. There is no getting around this. It is the only way for any form of dualism to work.

Quote:
The assumption in such research is that awareness is as simple as the "awareness" between two electron or quarks.  The type of neurological perception we see in complex organisms is not so much emergent as a "complexification" of that said awareness beyond presence, attraction or repulsion.

What you call 'complexification', I call 'emergence'. If you like, I'm a reductionist emergentist. I don't think emergence is incompatible with reduction, and it is useful to hold theories that are approximations of very complex probabilistic systems, such as organisms and minds.

Quote:
I am enough of a pragmatist to think that the red you experience is the same as me since they are from a common evelutionary development and physical process.

Well, I'm rather a pragmatist myself, and I remain agnostic on that issue. In fact, I think I lean towards each person experiencing things in their own unique ways, due to fetal and infant brain development being essentially a stochastic/probabilistic process of learning from environment. I do not think there is a gene for 'seeing red a certain way' or 'the seeing-red part of the brain'. How would such a gene evolve? It only matters that you and I both respond to various wavelengths of light in consistent ways, but it doesn't matter how that experience is implemented in the brain. If I saw green whenever you saw red and vice versa, as long as I call my green "red" and my red "green", and see green/"red" fruits as yummy and red/"green" vegetables as healthy to eat, then evolutionarily, my genes for vision are exactly as functional as yours.

It like, why are my fingerprints different than anyone else's? Does it really matter? As long as my finger tips are able to grip things easily, a random finger print is just as good as any other.

Quote:
But the problem of qualia is not like elan vital in that it is empirically a referent of which we speak but can not communicate since it is an internal private experience.

Depends on what you mean by 'communicate'.

For example, I cannot communicate to you what any of my neural synapses are doing. I'm simply unaware of those details. They are outside of my consciousness. And yet, there IS something going on in there (I hope! Eye-wink ). And not only that, but whatever's going on in my synapses is critical to my ability to think, to experience, and to communicate via text to you. In fact, whatever's going on in my synapses is literally part of my consciousness (as a process) in a deeply fundamental way, although I have no consciousness of it.

I cannot communicate to you via text what is happening in my synapses. But, if we had a super-techo brain scanner, or even just a modern-day probe electrode, we could observe what was happening in one of my synapses, and we could record that activity, and then we could communicate it to you by a simple data file.

It may even be the case that it just so happens that that particular neural synapse was the key synapse responsible for giving me a conscious experience of red. And so the data file we sent to you would literally be a communication of my personal, internal, 'private' experience.

So, no, I do not see this 'problem' with qualia. If they are physical, which is about as certain as anything, then they can be detected. If they can be detected, they can be recorded. If they can be recorded, they can be communicated.

You may say (as I imagine someone like Chalmers would), "But that's just a data file, you haven't really 'shared' or 'communicated' your experience of red!!!?!"

To which I say, "Well, with our super-techno brain zapper, I can located your synapse that happens to be in charge of your own personal experience of red, feed in a translated version of this data file, and induce you to experience precisely the same shade of red as I experienced. Whether you think qualia are uber-mysterious or not."

Quote:
I think we are close to talking about the same thing only different theories. Hope that helps with where I am at... is that PC enough I have my personal theories if ya would like to discuss yours.

Perhaps. It remains to be seen. I'll boil down my view to one simple question: Do you believe that it is in principle realistically possible that we could one day develop precise enough technology to detect, record, copy, simulate and reproduce a truly conscious mind that contains all your memories, your personality, and everything that makes 'you' 'you' (except, obviously your body), and flip a switch and thing thing will be a true replica of your mind, including the ability to 'consciously' 'experience' 'qualia' of the same sort that you do?

If you answer yes, then you agree with my view at its essence. If you answer no, you don't.

That about sums it up I think.

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And that's why dictionaries

And that's why dictionaries are important. Eye-wink


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'Tis not. Sentient means

BobSpence1 wrote:
BennyBoy wrote:

My point really is that you have to just let a word mean what it means.

1) That is meaningless nonsense.

2) How do 'know' what a word 'just' means???

3) Wrt the OP, dictionaries are important as records of consensual usage.

1)  You caught me using a word imprecisely.  That's fine, and there is a lot of colorful usage in every day life that we wouldn't want to apply to a debate.  In a debate, if you were using "just" to mean right and lawful, and I challenged you, saying that "just" shows that something is so simple that it should be easy, you could challenge me on that and I'd have concede the usage since you have the stronger precedent:

< Latin jūstus righteous, equivalent to  jūs law, right + -tus adj. suffix

2) Look at its etymology, and decide if the changes in its evolution were justified.

3) The problem with consensus, not to put too fine a point on it, is that a lot of people are dumbasses, and we don't want them making imprecise meanings for everything just because they can't be bothered to learn what they really mean.  Yes, you can make refinements in the context of a conversation or debate if you're trying to express a variation on an idea: that's fine.  But where there's a dispute, and someone refuses to accept your innovative use of a word, you have to go to the meaning the word HAS used, or just walk away.  So if you say, "Since I don't know if anyone else has feelings, I think its better to define sentience in behavioral terms.  If something acts as though it feels, that's good enough," that's fine.  If anyone at all says, "That's not what the word means, and I do not accept your definition," then do you a) argue the philosophy of it and call the guy a moron, or b) just pick a different word and carry on with your experiments?

I know that some scientists will choose (a), and the reason is a belligerent one: now that a material or physicalist view has become dominant, there's an antibiotic reaction to ideas that do not fit with that world view.  Next, I'll claim that I'm a sentient, feeling being, not a machine, and the inevitable reponse will be: "Show me the evidence."  Case closed.  Definition changed.


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bennyboy wrote:BobSpence1

bennyboy wrote:

BobSpence1 wrote:
BennyBoy wrote:

My point really is that you have to just let a word mean what it means.

1) That is meaningless nonsense.

2) How do 'know' what a word 'just' means???

3) Wrt the OP, dictionaries are important as records of consensual usage.

1)  You caught me using a word imprecisely.  That's fine, and there is a lot of colorful usage in every day life that we wouldn't want to apply to a debate.  In a debate, if you were using "just" to mean right and lawful, and I challenged you, saying that "just" shows that something is so simple that it should be easy, you could challenge me on that and I'd have concede the usage since you have the stronger precedent:

< Latin jūstus righteous, equivalent to  jūs law, right + -tus adj. suffix

2) Look at its etymology, and decide if the changes in its evolution were justified.

3) The problem with consensus, not to put too fine a point on it, is that a lot of people are dumbasses, and we don't want them making imprecise meanings for everything just because they can't be bothered to learn what they really mean.  Yes, you can make refinements in the context of a conversation or debate if you're trying to express a variation on an idea: that's fine.  But where there's a dispute, and someone refuses to accept your innovative use of a word, you have to go to the meaning the word HAS used, or just walk away.  So if you say, "Since I don't know if anyone else has feelings, I think its better to define sentience in behavioral terms.  If something acts as though it feels, that's good enough," that's fine.  If anyone at all says, "That's not what the word means, and I do not accept your definition," then do you a) argue the philosophy of it and call the guy a moron, or b) just pick a different word and carry on with your experiments?

I know that some scientists will choose (a), and the reason is a belligerent one: now that a material or physicalist view has become dominant, there's an antibiotic reaction to ideas that do not fit with that world view.  Next, I'll claim that I'm a sentient, feeling being, not a machine, and the inevitable reponse will be: "Show me the evidence."  Case closed.  Definition changed.

Lol, screw all that has transpired on this thread up to now, back to square one.

"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc


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natural wrote:TGBaker

natural wrote:

TGBaker wrote:

natural wrote:

The problem of qualia is

exactly

like the problem of phlogiston, of

elan vital

, of intelligent design, of homeopathy, of 'psychics', of prayer, etc. None of it has any practical impact on reality, except for the actions of those deluded by the ideas.


Edit: I just came up with a good way of putting this, right after I hit 'post'.

Basically, neuroscience has destroyed the idea of a unified 'soul'. So, philosophers aware of this destruction via neuroscience, but still desiring a soul to exist, invented 'qualia', the 'souls' of individual neurons.

No I assume qualia and consciousness are a physical phenomenon. And why would I assume that just because something is not reducible it is non-physical? That is why I threw David Chalmers into this mix.

Chalmers is a git.

Quote:
  Because consciousness is not reducibe to the functional level of NCC his work looks at a property dualism rather than anything Cartesian.

I repeat: "The problem of qualia is exactly like the problem of phlogiston, of elan vital, ... etc."

Property dualism amounts to the claim that some properties are just mental and some are just physical. There's a mysterious 'mentalness' that cannot, I repeat, cannot be investigated by physics, because it is too mysterious. It is, but this distinction, defined as non-physical.

In exactly the same way that vitalists claim that some matter is just alive, and some matter just isn't. There's a mysterious 'aliveness' that cannot be detected physically, etc. etc.

There is zero evidence of property dualism, it's just mumbo jumbo.

The 'souls' of the neurons indeed.

Quote:
  I do not think the actual causality of a baseball being hit by a bat is reducible. You certainly can reduce it to a quantum level but is it that the causality is upward from there or on the macro-level of the baseball game?

Umm, I think you just answered your own question: It can be reduced to the quantum level. The end. The 'but' is irrelevant to reducibility. Causality is indeed an 'emergent' relationship based on the fact that macro-objects consist of ginormous amounts of quantum objects, making the whole thing an exercise in sums and averages: Statistical approximations of quantum systems. Thermodynamics.

Quote:
I do not think that qualia are imaginary phenomena however. I think that we are dealing with simply a mental language in this case color.  The real problem of consciousness is whether the qualia are conscious states or whether they are constituents of consciousness.  The question of qualia once you remove the mysterians and the spiritualist flavoring is precisely what the Mary problem shows.  We already can identify the experience of red and in some sense in the brain.(The synethesia experiments of Ramachandran and the visual areas above the dysfunction is where "red" and then in a lower area the word red resides in our brain).  The question really is what is experiencing the "red". As to the representation: "red" ultimately is a mental state that IS representative of the external causal agent to our senses.

All of which is to say that you don't agree with the mysterian definitions of qualia. In that case, the Mary problem is useless. The whole point of it is to show that there is 'something more' to experience than can be 'reduced' to physics. But the presentation of the 'problem' is so absurd. She reads books about physics, and the mysterians equate this to: 'Thus, she has all the physical knowledge of red you could possibly imagine'. Um, sorry, no. That's a bait and switch. Later, she sees a red rose and goes "Oh!" and we're supposed to be impressed that she has 'learned something new that cannot be 'reduced' to shared experience' whatever that means, which is never defined.

You say:

Quote:
The real problem of consciousness is whether the qualia are conscious states or whether they are constituents of consciousness.

How is that a 'problem' of consciousness in the 'hard' way? It is a minor detail, if qualia are acknowledged as physical.

It's like saying the 'real problem' of photosynthesis is whether the light energy is first stored in chlorophyll and then put to work to make sugars, or whether the light energy directly drives a chemical reaction using chlorophyll as a catalyst. Who fucking cares? The point is that no magic vital force is required when sugars are synthesized!

Likewise, if qualia are physical, who cares if they are 'states' or 'the process itself'? The point is that consciousness has a physical mechanism. Figuring out the nitty gritty details is neurologist's research problem, compared to the astounding fact that people like Chalmers (not to mention billions of theists) grasp desperately to hold on to their imaginary 'souls'.

Quote:
Consciousness will be something like a property dualism in which material patterns are information agents in a similar sense as DNA.

DNA does not require property dualism to do its job. Information is just information, there isn't 'life' information and there isn't 'mental' information. It's all just information. Informational structures build upon themselves, and you get complicated things like life happening, and even more complicated things like consciousness happening. No. Magic. Required.

Quote:
  The idea of consciousness being fundamental by Chalmers is speculative but nothing to do with anything spiritual or non-physical.

He would deny his non-physicalism, but if you actually listen to what he says and read what he writes, he defines entities in such ways that they are non-physical by definition. There is no getting around this. It is the only way for any form of dualism to work.

Quote:
The assumption in such research is that awareness is as simple as the "awareness" between two electron or quarks.  The type of neurological perception we see in complex organisms is not so much emergent as a "complexification" of that said awareness beyond presence, attraction or repulsion.

What you call 'complexification', I call 'emergence'. If you like, I'm a reductionist emergentist. I don't think emergence is incompatible with reduction, and it is useful to hold theories that are approximations of very complex probabilistic systems, such as organisms and minds.

Quote:
I am enough of a pragmatist to think that the red you experience is the same as me since they are from a common evelutionary development and physical process.

Well, I'm rather a pragmatist myself, and I remain agnostic on that issue. In fact, I think I lean towards each person experiencing things in their own unique ways, due to fetal and infant brain development being essentially a stochastic/probabilistic process of learning from environment. I do not think there is a gene for 'seeing red a certain way' or 'the seeing-red part of the brain'. How would such a gene evolve? It only matters that you and I both respond to various wavelengths of light in consistent ways, but it doesn't matter how that experience is implemented in the brain. If I saw green whenever you saw red and vice versa, as long as I call my green "red" and my red "green", and see green/"red" fruits as yummy and red/"green" vegetables as healthy to eat, then evolutionarily, my genes for vision are exactly as functional as yours.

It like, why are my fingerprints different than anyone else's? Does it really matter? As long as my finger tips are able to grip things easily, a random finger print is just as good as any other.

Quote:
But the problem of qualia is not like elan vital in that it is empirically a referent of which we speak but can not communicate since it is an internal private experience.

Depends on what you mean by 'communicate'.

F

It may even be the case that it just so happens that that particular neural synapse was the key synapse responsible for giving me a conscious experience of red. And so the data file we sent to you would literally be a communication of my personal, internal, 'private' experience.

So, no, I do not see this 'problem' with qualia. If they are physical, which is about as certain as anything, then they can be detected. If they can be detected, they can be recorded. If they can be recorded, they can be communicated.

You may say (as I imagine someone like Chalmers would), "But that's just a data file, you haven't really 'shared' or 'communicated' your experience of red!!!?!"

 

Quote:
I think we are close to talking about the same thing only different theories. Hope that helps with where I am at... is that PC enough I have my personal theories if ya would like to discuss yours.

Perhaps. It remains to be seen. I'll boil down my view to one simple question: Do you believe that it is in principle realistically possible that we could one day develop precise enough technology to detect, record, copy, simulate and reproduce a truly conscious mind that contains all your memories, your personality, and everything that makes 'you' 'you' (except, obviously your body), and flip a switch and thing thing will be a true replica of your mind, including the ability to 'consciously' 'experience' 'qualia' of the same sort that you do?o

 

If you answer yes, then you agree with my view at its essence. If you answer no, you don't.

That about sums it up I think.

I doubt that Chalmers is a git. Also contrary to WIKI property dualism does not necessarily though traditional hold for a physical and a mental (non-physical) property. It can and does hold for a mental non-material but nonetheless physical property. I repeat that qualia as used phenomenologically is not like your woo woo stuff. It simply connotes that which you experience. Sine we are dealing with a quality of experience it is phenomenologically and empirically a subject.  To reduce it to the functions of it causes does not explain its presence in consciousness nor consciousness itself contrary to Dennett.  I don't think Chalmers has anyway come close either.  But a property dualism is a good start.  The Mary problem and the inverted spectrum  problems show that we experience something that is first person dependent on our brains.  An analogy of property dualism can be seen in many things ...particles with position, momentum weight and spin.  Chalmers is speculative but the hard problem is precisely what does not go away with your position. We are conscious and we empirically can iunderstand the world. We empirically want to understand or consciousness as well and its constiuants like qualia.  As to the red/green inversion thingy. It only works in a thought experiment. That is why I suspect that you see red very much like I do. It turns out that red and green have different warms to them such that they do not exchange well according to those who do such experiments.  I have no problem with reductionism but I do think there are things that can not be reduced from there own causal levels.  

I do not know which strawman you are arguing against. Have you read all of Chalmers and Dennett's stuff?  No one is arguing that what is going on in the dendrites, axions and their neurons are not producing consciousness.  At least I am not.But consciousness is a physical emergent state just as a chessgame is emergent from the rules of the game. Is the game  reducible to the quantum level? Certainly.  But does the conscious emergent properties of the individuals as following the game rules explain the causality and the quantum state better than the quantum phenomenon explaining the macro-level phenomenon?

NATURAL: You state : For  example, I cannot communicate to you what any of my neural synapses are doing. I'm simply unaware of those details. They are outside of my consciousness. And yet, there IS something going on in there (I hope! Eye-wink ). And not only that, but whatever's going on in my synapses is critical to my ability to think, to experience, and to communicate via text to you. In fact, whatever's going on in my synapses is literally part of my consciousness (as a process) in a deeply fundamental way, although I have no consciousness of it.I cannot communicate to you via text what is happening in my synapses.

But, if we had a super-techo brain scanner, or even just a modern-day probe electrode, we could observe what was happening in one of my synapses, and we could record that activity, and then we could communicate it to you by a simple data file. To which I say, "Well, with our super-techno brain zapper, I can located your synapse that happens to be in charge of your own personal experience of red, feed in a translated version of this data file, and induce you to experience precisely the same shade of red as I experienced. Whether you think qualia are uber-mysterious or not."

TGB: Certainly. And note that you use in the whole statement "I experience".  That is the empirical thing that qualia is used for and various thought experiments to define. They may be interpreted differently by different philosophical schools of thought but your " I experience" is the subject of the analysis. The first person problem is merely that it is not some mystical state. it is a physical problem that has to do with where the subject of enguiry occurs.  Dennett takes exception to the problem with what it takes to create a virtual world for a brain in vat and applies it to the idea of recording conscious thought. It is simply a problem of so much data that you would need an organ literally like the brain with that many connections.  So theoretically we could reproduce the conscious state as I have. Perhaps some super advanced alien has done so in some supercomputer generated world in which he himself lives.  The question is not the observation of the causative factors of consciousness. The question we were discussing is an empirical and therefore phenomenological study of a conscious experience...thing and the consciousness itself. I think it is as I am reluctant to use the term emergent since it is used by non-physicalist and non-materialist so I see your objections to qualia. But that which you want to produce is what qualia denotes in a phenomenological an empirical analysis of consciousness. The spiritual and supernatural interpretations are unwarranted and fall in the same category as speaking of math and logic as non-physical.

"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa

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cj
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bennyboy wrote:2) Look at

bennyboy wrote:

2) Look at its etymology, and decide if the changes in its evolution were justified.

 

As my dear departed mother used to say - who died and made you god?

What gives you the right to say what change is and is not justified?

 

-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.

"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken

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cj wrote:bennyboy wrote:2)

cj wrote:

bennyboy wrote:

2) Look at its etymology, and decide if the changes in its evolution were justified.

 As my dear departed mother used to say - who died and made you god?

What gives you the right to say what change is and is not justified?

 

 

A respect for the people who have coined and used the word in the past.  A dictionary with a decent etymology for each word I want to know about.  Being a person who has to use words every day, and wanting them to mean something without having some goofball running to wiki every time he wants to make a point.

 

OR

 

A recognition that words are part of a huge interwoven fabric of meaning, not random grunting sounds we make to encapsulate whatever bubble happens to pop in our Starbucks-drinking, MTV-watching, I'm okay-you're okay, spelling doesn't matter, don't punish kids because they're too stupid to do their homework anyway brains.

 

Choose the answer you find least offensive.  Laughing out loud

 


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bennyboy wrote: cj wrote:

bennyboy wrote:

cj wrote:

bennyboy wrote:

2) Look at its etymology, and decide if the changes in its evolution were justified.

 As my dear departed mother used to say - who died and made you god?

What gives you the right to say what change is and is not justified?

 

 

A respect for the people who have coined and used the word in the past.  A dictionary with a decent etymology for each word I want to know about.  Being a person who has to use words every day, and wanting them to mean something without having some goofball running to wiki every time he wants to make a point.

 

OR

 

A recognition that words are part of a huge interwoven fabric of meaning, not random grunting sounds we make to encapsulate whatever bubble happens to pop in our Starbucks-drinking, MTV-watching, I'm okay-you're okay, spelling doesn't matter, don't punish kids because they're too stupid to do their homework anyway brains.

 

Choose the answer you find least offensive.  Laughing out loud

 

 

The point was that who are you to say what is respectful or disrespectful of those people who coined the word in the past.  You can't exactly call them up and ask - they're dead. 

There are a fair number of words and phrases that I used when I was much younger that I would not now say out loud in public where other people could hear me - like - groovy.  Or words that did not exist when I was younger - LAN, internet, intranet, etc.  Or words that have changed meaning - that was so good, it was bad.  (Really, "bad" was not used that way in 1960.)

Good, bad, indifferent?  Short lived slang or a permanent change to the language?  Who the hell knows and why the hell is it important? 

As for running to Wiki - it is fast, convenient, and often properly footnoted.  If there are references to other distinguished sources - dictionaries, encyclopedias, linguistic studies, etc - why isn't it a good source?  So I'll look it up in Wiki and go for the links at the end of the article.  Lots faster than straight up googling - you can get so much junk when you use a search engine.  The real answer may be 40 pages down as you wade through all the conspiracy theorists and theist garbage.  And if you had bothered to check - Wiki references the dictionary website.  And the two web pages are identical. 

And FYI, I am one of the Starbucks guzzlers up here in Portland OR.  I think I would be deported to some benighted state east of the Mississippi River if I didn't like Starbucks - but that is not an issue for me.  I carry my coffee around with me everywhere. 

Spelling bugs me, too, but that is because I am good at spelling - always have been.  But spelling changes, too.  And it has nothing to do with being respectful of the original spellers as none of them could agree on the proper spelling.  Which is why Samuel Johnson's Dictionary was so revolutionary and controversial when it first was published.  I see no reason for spelling not to change so English words are spelled more phonetically and less of a mish mash of foreign language rules and exceptions.

Yeah, byootuhfuhl looks horrid and maybe I would prefer bewtuhfulh, but it is closer to how it is pronounced and may be the dictionary proper spelling some day in the future.  I am not interested in having heartburn over what may happen in the future as I have plenty of more important things to get upset about in the present.

 

-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.

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hehe It's not really bad to

hehe

 

It's not really bad to drink at Starbucks as long as you don't sit at the window with your laptop all day pretending to write.  Wait a minute, where are you right now? Laughing out loud

I agree with all you guys that there's no point being anal about it.  There are some words where our diction has changed and probably deserve to be changed: night--> nite for example.  And you could point even to Shakespeare for examples of free spelling, and nobody here is better at English than he was methinks.

Words like LAN and internet are cool because they're new.  Nothing wrong with making new words if you have a new thing to talk about.

 

My issue isn't so much with evolutionary changes of meaning, like "really good" meaning truly good moving to "really good" meaning very good.  My problem is with people who resort to special uses of terms, especially mundane ones that have taken on scientific or academic meanings, and using them to weasel out of a hopeless philosophical debate.  So, for example, you get the issue of material vs physical vs "stuff" vs. whatever.  That's fine, if someone wants to refine vocabulary in a refined debate.  But when you know what someone's trying to say, pulling out those type of refinements halfway through a debate isn't really debating-- it's refusing to debate fairly.

 

I think the rule should be that the more general, or mundane, version of a word should be assumed, unless someone declares they want to use the word in a specific way.  No looking back and saying, "Oh, we've been arguing for 20 pages when I meant ______ (some obscure rare definition).  You're dumb for not realizing that."  That sucks.


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Hello

Hello,

Some of you atheists are really idiots. I would recommend my thread, God thinks your an idiot.

As an atheist, there is no objectivity to anything, including language. A friend of mine went to a liberal college, Portland State, and took an English class. The teacher put up on the board Who as the direct object.

My friend raised his hand and said that it is grammaticaly correct to say WHOM. The teacher got furious. He stated that there are no rules to grammar and English. You say it to the point where the person understands, but language is not technical, it is relational.

This is liberalism.

The dictionary is via connotative definition. But the only thing an atheist can do, is ostensive definition, if even that.

So this is an interesting thread. NO, dictionaries do mean shit if you're an atheist. Only if you're a Christian.

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).

A Rational Christian of Intelligence (rare)with a valid and sound justification for my epistemology and a logical refutation for those with logical fallacies and false worldviews upon their normative of thinking in retrospect to objective normative(s). This is only understood via the imago dei in which we all are.

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).


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This has been an interesting

This has been an interesting thread.  I've learned a lot.  One of the most interesting things for me to learn was that some people take the Greek and Latin roots of words very seriously.  In high school I remember spending a few hours learning about Latin roots, and that is pretty much all I though about it until I started this thread.   I also learned a few new terms  diachronic and synchronic.   From what I gather diachronic referrers to studding how language changes over time, while synchronic is studying language in a specific time.   I've learned that their is no absolute authority on what a word means.  

In regards to what meaning of a word should be used in a specific conversation it seems that their are two main factors to consider.  

1.  Authority (I feel that authority is sometimes important even though their is not absolute authority)

2.  Usefulness

 

Authority is important because it is necessary to determine who gets the finally say on what a word means.  If you cannot determine who or what has the authority in any given situation you can not choose an agreed upon definition and you can't continue on to a meaningful conversation.  

Usefulness is important because if the definition that is finally chosen is useless then it is impossible to continue on to a meaningful conversation.  

 

Knowing who has authority and what definitions are useful seems to be a bit complicated.  I have my own opinions on a number of possible scenarios.  I think that every field of study has the authority to choose definitions to words used in that field of study to be used by people in the pursuit of that particular  field of study.  In other words physicists as a group get to choose what words, such a energy and force, mean in regards to the subject of physics, and people talking about physics should use those words in that way.   After I thought about this for a while I realized that I don't want to extend this same authority to the field of philosophy.  I feel this way because I believe that around 90 percent or so of philosophy is crap and I don't want to be stuck using their crappy definitions.  Perhaps I'm being unfair, but I've been subject to a lot of crap under the name of philosophy and it has soured my views on the subject.

In regards to general conversation I think that things should be more Democratic.  Commonly used definitions should be given greater consideration, and when reaching agreement is difficult the usefulness of the different definitions should be considered.  


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RatDog wrote: 2.

RatDog wrote:

 

2.  Usefulness

 

Authority is important because it is necessary to determine who gets the finally say on what a word means.  If you cannot determine who or what has the authority in any given situation you can not choose an agreed upon definition and you can't continue on to a meaningful conversation.  

Usefulness is important because if the definition that is finally chosen is useless then it is impossible to continue on to a meaningful conversation.  

  

I totally agree.  Usefulness in the end is everything.  The question then is this: how do we get the maximum utility, efficiency and clarity out of a word?  Obviously you know my answer: that a word's meaning should be carefully maintained.  However, that doesn't preclude people from redefining it for convenience in the context of a disussion.

 

Frankly, I'm surprised and happy that so many people have had so much to say about the issue.  I suspected it would get about 3 posts and die.  Boy, was I wrong about that!  To me, that means people actually care about the language, which I find very reassuring.


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TGBaker wrote:BobSpence1

TGBaker wrote:

BobSpence1 wrote:

Curious - how was it assessed that 'Mary' was color blind, if she could still distinguish between things of different color??

The very good gray scale differentiation was learned as she aged. Such are thought experiments.

 

 EDIT: Oh by the way if she had been born with the acuity and apart from her acquiring her acuity over the years there would be no way to determine presently her experience of gray from your red since she would not be missing out as far as she knows and would have a good functional language game to communicate with you.

But a given gray scale level can be generated by almost any color, so she cannot base identification of color on true gray scale level alone - that is physically impossible. It is far more plausible that her brain is identifying color in the normal way, but she is labelling it differently.

How do we know she is 'seeing' what we think of as 'gray' when she looks at a colored object?? It makes no sense. The more I think about this the more absurd it seems to me. All we can determine is whether or not she can distinguish between two different colors.

This does indeed get the heart of WTF 'qualia' means. I am very much with Dennet here, as in most things.

 

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BobSpence1 wrote:How do we

BobSpence1 wrote:

How do we know she is 'seeing' what we think of as 'gray' when she looks at a colored object?? It makes no sense. The more I think about this the more absurd it seems to me. All we can determine is whether or not she can distinguish between two different colors.

This does indeed get the heart of WTF 'qualia' means. I am very much with Dennet here, as in most things.

There is an actual physiological defect that causes colour blindness.  We can know for a fact that her eyes are not able to distinguish colours.  I'm also with Dennet on this issue, just adding that there is a way to know that she cannot interpret colours. 

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Quote:I doubt that Chalmers

Quote:
I doubt that Chalmers is a git.

Actually, you can check Wikipedia. It's a fact! It says right there on his page: 'Git'

Eye-wink

Quote:
I repeat that qualia as used phenomenologically is not like your woo woo stuff. It simply connotes that which you experience.

Thanks for the discussion, TG. I understand your distinction, but I was referring to the 'problem' of qualia, namely the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness'. It is my position that the 'hard problem' is not a real problem. It is not hard, and it's not even a problem. It's an imaginary problem in the minds of people like Chalmers and Searle, when they propose Chinese Zombie Marys. Those who maintain that it is a hard are at some level clinging to a neural 'soul' concept.

Qualia can only be problematic when they are defined as non-physical. The physical qualia you are defending are not the problematic kind, and I have no problem with that usage of the word.

Quote:
But a property dualism is a good start.

The 'property dualism' you're defending is unfamilar to me. I'm only familiar with the kind that maintains that 'mental' is definitionally distinct from 'physical'. Physicalism, which is a monism, maintains that 'mental' is just another form of 'physical', not a distinct thing, and hence no need for 'dualism'. Honestly, your property dualism is much closer to physicalism than most other property dualists I've encountered. I honestly don't see what the 'dualism' aspect buys for you. What advantage is there in thinking of 'mental' properties as so very distinct from 'non-mental' properties as to deserve splitting the universe into two (i.e. dualism)? Is what you're talking about even really dualism at all?

Here are some questions which should illustrate the peculiarity of it for you:

Are there any organisms which do not have any 'mentalness'? Such as bacteria, fungi, or perhaps even viruses (if you consider them a form of life, which I do). If there are such non-mental organisms, then exactly where do you draw the line between mental organisms and non-mental ones? How can you tell? How can you perform an experiment to place the mental ones in one box and the non-mental ones in another box?

Since evolution works in tiny tiny increments, how did mentalness evolve? Where did it come from?

If you are a 'mentalness' property dualist, are you also a 'lifeness' property dualist? If not, why not? What is distinct about life that disqualifies it as fitting the exact same criteria you use to decide that it is necessary to divide the universe into non-mental and mental, but not also into non-life and life?

If you are a 'lifeness' dualist, then why stop there? Are you also a 'gravity vs. electromagnetism' dualist or a 'human vs. animal' dualist or a 'space-time vs. matter/energy' dualist?

Note that a physicalist does not suffer these confusions. Yes, there is life and non-life, mental and non-mental. But they are not so distinct as to split the entire universe into two! (Or three, or four.) They are simply different arrangements of raw physical entities, and they implement different processes such that it is useful to build theories about 'life' and 'mind' as reductionistically-emergent (i.e. thermodynamically and stochastically complex systems which are in practice difficult or impossible to describe in terms of base quantum theory, but nevertheless theoretically built entirely out of the quantum level, with no true 'gaps' except for gaps in our understanding).

How can 'mentalness' be studied scientifically in a way that deserves keeping it forever distinct from physics? What evidence can be gathered about the 'mental', which does not depend on purely physical processes, the very same processes that control fusion inside stars, the calculations inside your computer, and any other 'non-mental' process?

And finally, probably most importantly, what are the theories and predictions that 'mentalness' dualism provides that non-dualistic physicalism does not also provide (and without mutliplying entities unnecessarily)? How does 'mentalness' dualism justify itself in the face of Occam's Razor? What does it buy us that physical monism doesn't? What can I do with property dualism that I can't do without it?

Quote:
An analogy of property dualism can be seen in many things ...particles with position, momentum weight and spin.

This is why I see your property dualism as closer to physicalism than other property dualists I've encountered: What you are referring to appears to me to be simply physical information.

If you acknowledge that information and information processes are physical, then why do you need dualism?

Are the information and processes of consciousness fundamentally different than the information and processes involved with digestion or homeostasis or plate tectonics or a heat pump or radioactive decay or the software that runs this website? I don't believe there is any fundamental difference, but it appears to me that 'mentalness' dualists are claiming that there is a fundamental difference. Or else why call yourself a dualist??

My position: Conscious experience is no different, fundamentally speaking, at the lowest level, from the physical information processes and structures collectively known as 'Google'. Yes, they are different, but not dualistically so. Not enough to distinguish one as 'non-physical', even if only in a property sense and not a woo-woo sense. They are both just physical information and processes. Both physical. Monistic. The same science that accounts for one accounts for the other also. Both Google and my conscious experience are bound by the laws of thermodynamics. My mind is not a 'perpetual experience' machine. Experience requires energy input just the same as any other ongoing process, and eventually my experience will succumb to entropy along with everything else in the universe.

Quote:
Chalmers is speculative but the hard problem is precisely what does not go away with your position.

What 'problem' is that exactly? Where is the problem? How can it be solved by anything other than physical sciences?

Quote:
Have you read all of Chalmers and Dennett's stuff?

I've seen Chalmers in video interviews and discussions. I've read one or two of his things on the 'hard problem', as well as lots of commentary from others defending his position as they saw it. Honestly, I have no motivation to buy and/or read his stuff after what I've seen so far. I can't stand obscurantists, especially ones that make a whole career out of it.

Quote:
But consciousness is a physical emergent state just as a chessgame is emergent from the rules of the game. Is the game  reducible to the quantum level? Certainly.  But does the conscious emergent properties of the individuals as following the game rules explain the causality and the quantum state better than the quantum phenomenon explaining the macro-level phenomenon?

I cannot grasp the intent of the last question there. I see no fundamental distinction between the conscious emergent properties of the players and the quantum phenomena. The only distinction is in the level of abstractness of our description. They are fundamentally a single unified information processing system, amenable to description both at the quantum level and the level of psychology and consciousness.

This is actually a good example to identify our differences (if there are any). Remember that purely-physical computers are perfectly capable of playing chess. They follow a deterministic, yet stochastic, process.

If you saw two computers playing chess (perhaps with robotic bodies and arms to move the chess pieces), would you classify this game as fundemantally different than two humans playing chess? I would not.

The computers don't 'experience' the same sensations or emotions as the humans do. There is a good case for saying that they do not even have 'conscious' experiences of the game as we would say of the humans. For the sake of bringing light to the discussion, I will even grant that these two computers can be shown to not have any conscious experiences of the kind that humans have.

However, this extremely significant difference does not matter at the fundamental level. The computers and the humans inhabit the exact same universe. There is no dualism. The only difference is that the humans have minds built up from complex structures that allow for conscious experience. But that conscious experience is fundamentally not any different than the minimax algorithm the computers use to pick their moves. They are both purely-physical information systems. Just like dogs can't see the range of colours we can, the computers can't experience the game the way we can. But it is not a difference in kind, only a difference in degree. A sufficiently structured computer could be capable of true conscious experience of the same kind that humans can. It just so happens that these two chess-playing computers don't have that sufficient structure. Ultimately, they all fall under the same universal physical rules.

Quote:
Certainly. And note that you use in the whole statement "I experience".  That is the empirical thing that qualia is used for and various thought experiments to define. They may be interpreted differently by different philosophical schools of thought but your " I experience" is the subject of the analysis. The first person problem is merely that it is not some mystical state. it is a physical problem that has to do with where the subject of enguiry occurs.

I'm okay with your usage of qualia. But then I must again ask: What is the real problem?

I mean: If we do not yet completely understand the conscious brain, yes, that's a problem that remains to be solved. Surely. But this is not (explicitly not!) what people are referring to by the so-called 'hard problem'. This is the so-called 'soft' or 'easy' problem.

If we accept that the easy problem is something that physical science can investigate, then the so-called 'hard problem' must refer to something else. Something 'beyond' the understanding of a conscious brain. Most, like yourself, refer to first-person experience.

Okay, so first person experience then. Is this a problem that's different from understanding the conscious brain? I don't actually think so, but I'll grant for the sake of discussion that it might be. However, is this a problem that will be resolved by physical (as distinct from dualistically 'mental') sciences? Or is there some sort of barrier or limitation between physics and first-person experience? If so, what is it? Where is this problematic barrier?

And if we can identify a real barrier (again, I doubt it, but I'll grant it), then how will this problem be resolved besides through the monist-physical sciences?

It is very much like intelligent design or psychics or anything like that. They claim there's this impassable barrier between science/physics (as in, non-mentally-dualistic physics), but they offer no way to resolve the problem either!

If this 'problem' is such a problem that physics can't address it, but nobody else can either, then it is not really a real problem, is it?

I don't know what 'came before' the big bang. Maybe we will never know. Maybe it is not a problem that physics can solve. But in that case, nobody else can solve it either, so how is it really a problem of physics per se?

(Note: Don't take any of the above as me not realizing that you're not on the woo-woo side of things. I get it.)

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BobSpence1 wrote:TGBaker

BobSpence1 wrote:

TGBaker wrote:

BobSpence1 wrote:

Curious - how was it assessed that 'Mary' was color blind, if she could still distinguish between things of different color??

The very good gray scale differentiation was learned as she aged. Such are thought experiments.

 

 EDIT: Oh by the way if she had been born with the acuity and apart from her acquiring her acuity over the years there would be no way to determine presently her experience of gray from your red since she would not be missing out as far as she knows and would have a good functional language game to communicate with you.

But a given gray scale level can be generated by almost any color, so she cannot base identification of color on true gray scale level alone - that is physically impossible. It is far more plausible that her brain is identifying color in the normal way, but she is labelling it differently.

How do we know she is 'seeing' what we think of as 'gray' when she looks at a colored object?? It makes no sense. The more I think about this the more absurd it seems to me. All we can determine is whether or not she can distinguish between two different colors.

This does indeed get the heart of WTF 'qualia' means. I am very much with Dennet here, as in most things.

 

  It could be rather than she is labeling it differently as you said that her V1 is discerning the color but it has failed to be processed in the dorsel channel as it flows back into the frontal area of the brain, That still points to that thing which you have first personal knowledge of and is an experience from a brain function in consciousness as  red or blue or pain or what have you. You do not actually experience the thing in itself but a product of your senses that is representative of an external object to your consciousness. I think that Dennett gets to the function of perception but not that empirical object that is produced and experienced by consciousness which really is a neural correlate to an external object. I think this is where Chalmers overcomes the non-physical argument from philosophy of mind about qualia and consciousness and places it as a physical phenomenon that as an object of study has the disadvantage of being the same thing by which we study empirically everything else. He also argued for what he called "The principle of organizational invariance." In this paper he argues that if a system such as one of appropriately configured computer chips reproduces the functional organization of the brain, it will also reproduce the qualia associated with the brain.

 

I made up the part about the gray scale because I did not want to copy the original scenario of mary being stuck in a black and white room all her life and finally going out and seeing color. It's a thought experiment.  The other thought experiment is the old switched spectrum where she sees green instead of red.  The idea of the presentation is not the NCC but whether you can visualize the experience of what is added to her own experience. She finally knows red through an empirical process rather than abstract data.  We can think of her growing up not being able to distinquish color and learning that she can pin this type of gray with that color.  The addition is simply the thing new that is experienced if you can imagined what it is like to be that way within your own consciousness. It points to qualia as not the functioning of the neurons but their product as being experienced by another neurological function called consciousness.  What I intended to represent is the fact of what you know as red can be isolated as a first personal process in your head through you imagining the situation and what is added to her experience.

If you were color blind and knew of  this or that being blue from others telling you of their experience  then you suddenly had the restoration of discernment back you could distinguish between this color and that from your conscious experience. With blindsight there are examples where the visual channels are intact except for damage that allows the process to be experienced consciously. The victims are blind. They can not experience any conscious sight but when asked to take a cup from another's hand they reach for it in the proper place and take it.  The processing from the eyes makes its way back to the V1 (primary visual cortex ) in the back part of the brain.  So there is perception but not conscious perception since the information is interrupted by the damage in specific areas along the channel that goes to the pre-frontal cortex.  The idea of philosophical Zombies parallels such phenomenon.

A philosophical zombie is a thought experiment where a person like you has all functioning and perception as you do but lacks the state of "what it is like to be" conscious.  The quotation is from Thomas Nigel's, What It is Like to Be a Bat from Scientific American ( I think) and reproduced in Douglas Hofstader's, the Mind's I. A zombie has all of the behavioral and functional processes of the brain intact except for consciousness. The argument is that since you can imagine such a state it points to what it is like to be conscious. Is this thing that is experienced epiphenomenal or is it some yet to be defined process in the brain?

 

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natural wrote:The 'property

natural wrote:

The 'property dualism' you're defending is unfamilar to me. I'm only familiar with the kind that maintains that 'mental' is definitionally distinct from 'physical'. Physicalism, which is a monism, maintains that 'mental' is just another form of 'physical', not a distinct thing, and hence no need for 'dualism'. Honestly, your property dualism is much closer to physicalism than most other property dualists I've encountered. I honestly don't see what the 'dualism' aspect buys for you. What advantage is there in thinking of 'mental' properties as so very distinct from 'non-mental' properties as to deserve splitting the universe into two (i.e. dualism)? Is what you're talking about even really dualism at all?


TGB: But consciousness is a physical emergent state just as a chessgame is emergent from the rules of the game. Is the game  reducible to the quantum level? Certainly.  But does the conscious emergent properties of the individuals as following the game rules explain the causality and the quantum state better than the quantum phenomenon explaining the macro-level phenomenon?

NATURAL: I cannot grasp the intent of the last question there. I see no fundamental distinction between the conscious emergent properties of the players and the quantum phenomena. The only distinction is in the level of abstractness of our description. They are fundamentally a single unified information processing system, amenable to description both at the quantum level and the level of psychology and consciousness.

This is actually a good example to identify our differences (if there are any). Remember that purely-physical computers are perfectly capable of playing chess. They follow a deterministic, yet stochastic, process.

No some of the new stuff in dealing with consciousness maintains a monism but see property dualism as a dual aspect of information ( as physical ). A wiki quote since it is late and I'm fried property dualism= double aspect:

In the philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of the same substance. The theory's relationship to neutral monism is ill-defined, but one proffered distinction says that whereas neutral monism allows the context of a given group of neutral elements to determine whether the group is mental, physical, both, or neither, double-aspect theory requires the mental and the physical to be inseparable and irreducible (though distinct).[1] Notable double-aspect theorists include Baruch Spinoza, Gustav Fechner, Arthur Schopenhauer, George Henry Lewes, and Thomas Nagel.[citation needed] David Chalmers explores a double-aspect view of information.

The particle physicist and Christian philosopher, John Polkinghorne, argues for "dual aspect monism" "there is only one stuff in the world (not two - the material and the not yet material) in a space where the two contrasting states (material and the space to be material phases, can occur, a physicist might say) this explains our perception of the difference between mind and matter: therefore, mind matters."[2]

The first person experience is simply consciousness but in context as first person data contrasted with third person data.  Third person data is that which we do science with... it is our reporting of the empirical and physical world. Ist person reports are utilized when we ask for example in an experiment, " Is the pattern fluctuating from your left eye to the  right or is it an image of a duck before both eyes"  as in neurological studies for NCC.  What we do pragmatically is bracket out the observation that all third person data is processed in a first person context. A physicist reporting a change of a particles spin is reporting  third person data but it is derived from his first person experience.  We forget the fact that the physicist could be lying, on acid or misinterpreting the event.  We can not yet falsify such claims.   But we do predominately work in a pragmatic sense of suspending the level of skepticism to the conscious observer.

However to deal with consciousness we are attempting to observe the means by which we do our observing itself. Where Chalmer's is good is in this process of attempting to design methodologies to define and study the "hard problem." I have a little more trust in his process  because he was first a scientist that only reluctantly learned philosophy because of its necessity to deal with statements about mind and consciousness. Again I do not disagree with you when you say:

" The only difference is that the humans have minds built up from complex structures that allow for conscious experience. But that conscious experience is fundamentally not any different than the minimax algorithm the computers use to pick their moves. They are both purely-physical information systems. Just like dogs can't see the range of colours we can, the computers can't experience the game the way we can. But it is not a difference in kind, only a difference in degree."

It is precisely here the question of property dualism come up.  TO digress for a second. String theory and the holographic principle developed by Lenny Suskind and widely accepted by most physicists  came about because of his concern with Hawking's blackhole paradox. It violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics because it concluded that as a blackhole evaporates its information is lost as well.   It is this question about consciousness as being simply the degree  and not kind that is resolved with the working hypothesis of Chalmers that information is fundamental  and non-reducible like the other fundamental laws of physics. It is a physical property that IS information as an aspect of matter. Consciousness emerges as the complexity of information or as you put it "from complex structures that allow for conscious experience."  Dennett succeeds in the functionalism of these structures and processes. But I think it is a mistake to equate the functional for the phenomenological.  The complex structures of which you speak are the functional and basis of the phenomenal  which as you say allow for conscious experience. It is conscious experience itself ( the emergent or as I say complexification) that one wants to scientifically and empirically pin down.

AS to finally the macro-level chess game. I was not so much interested in the conscious state of the players as to the fact that the rules inform the casaulity of the game. DO those rules emerge from the quantum physical state of the chess game or do those rules from a separate causality inform the quantum physical state of the chess game and therefore is non-reducible below Newton's bird's eye view?  If there is top down causality reductionism needs a methodology which can measurably identify the level of causality such that it is not dependent on the conscious observer.  For example do I look at the hands on the clock or do I look at the cogs inside. Obviously that is observer dependent.  If consciousness is an emergent property of the brain ( and I think that it is) then the distinction between 1st person data reporting and 3rd person data reporting shows how primitive our language and vocabulary is regarding 1st person reporting as well as our scientific usage of that reporting. Yet almost as an act of faith all of our 3rd person reporting comes from and is accepted by  1st person reporting. Third person reporting has been refined such that we can verify the reporting by experimentation, verification and falsification.   Such refinement of terminology as qualia, consciousness, experience, perception, awareness, attention and intention as well as methodology is needed beyond a philosophy of phenomenology.  Sam Harris as well as Chalmers point to the long history of Eastern literature focusing on mental processes and a possible area for research of methodology.  If one is studying the Neural Correlates of Consciousness as well as the Neeural Correlates of the contents of Consciousness one must also study the conscious correlates to the neurological activity. I see  Christoff Koch, V, Ramachandran, the Churchlands and Chalmers as the best source of dialectic analysis ( I tend to read opposing views until I find the problems with a view).

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Ktulu wrote:BobSpence1

Ktulu wrote:

BobSpence1 wrote:

How do we know she is 'seeing' what we think of as 'gray' when she looks at a colored object?? It makes no sense. The more I think about this the more absurd it seems to me. All we can determine is whether or not she can distinguish between two different colors.

This does indeed get the heart of WTF 'qualia' means. I am very much with Dennet here, as in most things.

There is an actual physiological defect that causes colour blindness.  We can know for a fact that her eyes are not able to distinguish colours.  I'm also with Dennet on this issue, just adding that there is a way to know that she cannot interpret colours. 

That is basically what I was referring to when I said we can test whether she can distinguish between any two colors colors.

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I see no more value in the

I see no more value in the version of Mary having normal color vision but being brought up in a black-and-white environment. If it 'proves' anything, it is that 'qualia' is an empty concept.

Whoever thought that up is a dumbass. Was that Chalmers? I have only come across occasional stuff from him, which left me distinctly unimpressed.

I long ago realized that Searle definitely does not 'get it', based on the stupid and pointless "Chinese Room" scenario.

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BobSpence1 wrote:I see no

BobSpence1 wrote:

I see no more value in the version of Mary having normal color vision but being brought up in a black-and-white environment. If it 'proves' anything, it is that 'qualia' is an empty concept.

Whoever thought that up is a dumbass. Was that Chalmers? I have only come across occasional stuff from him, which left me distinctly unimpressed.

I long ago realized that Searle definitely does not 'get it', based on the stupid and pointless "Chinese Room" scenario.

Mary is fairly old. I forget who originally composed it . Chalmers and many address it and its problems along with the zombi issue. I think you miss the point if you see no difference in her not seeing red and seeing red which is the qualia. it is this thing which lacks proper empirical research or definition.  The other aspect is that the red you experience is an actual physical thing but you can not describe it as you can an external object and point to it. Your experience remains personal and in need of empirical methods of analysis. So I don't see how it is an empty category. It is a physical event in which you can determine the causal phenomena but not describe its effect as with most effects. You only experience it.  Now  pragmatically I think your red is similarto mind because of our similar origins by natural selection. But we nontheless have no science of consciousness the very tool of our empiricism.

The reversed spectrum idea  in its many forms points to the fact that it is possible that your experience may not be the same as another's who may see the equivalent of your green. There is presently a lack of methodology to determine it. But the point is the two conscious experiences are physical but allude a method of analysis other than your own personal experience.  It seems to me those who would sluff off the actual conscious properties such as red or pain miss the point and opening the door to those e calling them a non-physical or illusory event. To look at the functional and behavior processes  and claim they are the complete descriptives is like looking the construction process of an item ( a car, a building) but missing its effect which it the thing itself and its behavior and function. The event of conscious and that which experiences the event is the hard problem of consciousness which is a brain function no doubt but a unique pphenomenon that we want to reproduce with AI but have no consensus as to what it is.

 

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BobSpence1 wrote:Ktulu

BobSpence1 wrote:

Ktulu wrote:

BobSpence1 wrote:

How do we know she is 'seeing' what we think of as 'gray' when she looks at a colored object?? It makes no sense. The more I think about this the more absurd it seems to me. All we can determine is whether or not she can distinguish between two different colors.

This does indeed get the heart of WTF 'qualia' means. I am very much with Dennet here, as in most things.

There is an actual physiological defect that causes colour blindness.  We can know for a fact that her eyes are not able to distinguish colours.  I'm also with Dennet on this issue, just adding that there is a way to know that she cannot interpret colours. 

That is basically what I was referring to when I said we can test whether she can distinguish between any two colors colors.

I would disagree. We know patients can not distinguish colors all the time. We also know patients with a damage that prevents them from ecperiencing facial recognition.  The point is not that she cannot distinguish colors in the thought experiment it is the experience of the color as an actual phenomenon that is the point. The thought experiment is simply an attempt to create a context whereby people be shown the subject of the discussion, the color, a physiological phenomenon that itself is the subject of your awareness and a content of consciousness if not a separate conscious occurrance itself.


 

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TG, I understand the

TG,

I understand the 'problem' of qualia, I just see no way in which either version of the story really addresses it, they just reflect the difficulty of getting a conceptual handle on the 'problem'.

Recognition/response to anything which is a constituent of conscious experience is potentially detectable physically.

Both 'red' and 'pain' are labels for particular patterns/kinds of input to the brain, and both are processed at both a 'sub-conscious' and conscious level. Particular colors have been shown to be associated with particular moods, which is not a conscious reaction. Same for pain - we don't consciously decide to pull our hand away from a hotplate when we touch it. So the conscious perception associated with any input is not necessary for our brain to identify the nature of any stimulus.

There is nothing special about color vision here. I think the whole discussion of color is a distraction to the real 'problem'.

I see no reason, in principle, why we cannot ultimately identify the whole chain of underlying neuronal and chemical processes for consciousness.

My way of thinking about it is that 'consciousness' is what that process 'feels like' from the inside. I fully acknowledge our incomplete understanding of it, but I see continuing progress, which has long gone beyond our naive intuitions about it.

Just as the  metabolism of a cell can be described as a set of chemical interactions, which collectively contribute to what can be identifed at a 'higher' level of analysis or description as a unitary entity with basic drives for food and reproduction. Those 'drives' are only meaningful concepts at that integrative level, and are not 'reducible' to chemistry, without losing important aspects of the idea.

I see 'consciousness' as a similarly 'emergent' concept/description, several steps along the chain of successively 'higher' levels of description.

Just as a 'pattern' does not exist as an attribute of the individual components organized into the pattern, but only in the relationships between them. So Biology is NOT reducible to Chemistry, which is NOT 'reducible' to quantum mechanics. The lower level descriptions define the underlying mechanics of the higher-level processes, but such processes are not necessarily uniquely dependent on the specific particle interactions. As we can envisage an alternate chemistry for life, or silicon 'minds'.

 

 

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BobSpence1 wrote:TG,I

BobSpence1 wrote:

TG,

I understand the 'problem' of qualia, I just see no way in which either version of the story really addresses it, they just reflect the difficulty of gettingarti a conceptual handle on the 'problem'.

Recognition/response to anything which is a constituent of conscious experience is potentially detectable physically.

TGB: Hi Bob, the Mary problem does not resolve or define the problem Neither does the reversed spectrum or various zombie scenarios. They all do point to there is something that is as you say is difficult to get a "conceptual handle on". They again are thought experiments that do show there is a need to get a handle on a problem and it is called by many the hard problem

Both 'red' and 'pain' are labels for particular patterns/kinds of input to the brain, and both are processed at both a 'sub-conscious' and conscious level. Particular colors have been shown to be associated with particular moods, which is not a conscious reaction. Same for pain - we don't consciously decide to pull our hand away from a hotplate when we touch it. So the conscious perception associated with any input is not necessary for our brain to identify the nature of any stimulus.

TGB Yes as I have noted elsewhere in a post or two.  It is not a question of the whole chain of process from external event to sensory organ to neurons, dendrites, axions particular areas of processing  and chemo-lectrical functions that are in question. Nor is it the nexus of sensation such as pain or color with an associative feeling and fleeting memory, etc.  It is an importance to see the effect of all that causal process as corresponding to a representation of an external empirical experience. Secondly that that effect as experienced is a physical process which  can be analysed functionally by determining the neural correlates of it as a content of consciousness. It as a physical event in the brain functionally still lacks an analysis of it as a content in consciousness and indicates a second needed analysis as to the consciousness that experiences it or that which objectifies the event whether it is red, pain or a friend's face. This is not a plea for consciousness as being non-physical it is a concern of study that this defined process is ignored because of an obsolete behavoralism and a functionalism that defines a thing as  solely  as a process rather than an effect subject to empirical study itself.

There is nothing special about color vision here. I think the whole discussion of color is a distraction to the real 'problem'.

I see no reason, in principle, why we cannot ultimately identify the whole chain of underlying neuronal and chemical processes for consciousness.

TGB: We can and have some of that has actually been done in an early stage but the very terminology "underlying neuronal and chemical processes for consciousness" indicates as I said above that they are the causal and functional aspects of consciousness but not our empirical awareness of it. They are as you said "for consciousness."  In fact none of those processes are themselves conscious or conversely are we conscious of.

My way of thinking about it is that 'consciousness' is what that process 'feels like' from the inside. I fully acknowledge our incomplete understanding of it, but I see continuing progress, which has long gone beyond our naive intuitions about it.

TGB: I do not disagree. But you can read Christoff Koch or listen to his lectures and he and Krick's studies were intentionally  limited to NCC rather than consciousness in order to find the physical causative source of consciousness. The "feels like" is also only a physical phenomona but should not be ignored and should be studied. There are several competing theories. But Koch and Krick would have and did acknowledge that they are a precursor to actual cosciousness studies.

Just as the  metabolism of a cell can be described as a set of chemical interactions, which collectively contribute to what can be identifed at a 'higher' level of analysis or description as a unitary entity with basic drives for food and reproduction. Those 'drives' are only meaningful concepts at that integrative level, and are not 'reducible' to chemistry, without losing important aspects of the idea.

TGB: And that is a good statement about emergence or I would rather use a stolen term called "complexification" in order to maintain its dependence on causative events. Those drives as you say and I have posted elsewhere about single celled organisms can be analysed as information processing. Nothing more woo woo than a computer and software. They nor a computer program are reducible by deconstructing their MEDIUM. ( this goes to property dualism). Thye difference is that computer process in a linear manner and the brain does not.

I see 'consciousness' as a similarly 'emergent' concept/description, several steps along the chain of successively 'higher' levels of description.

TGB: I would not disagree.  I would note that the importance of calling the thing experienced  as qualia ( Chalmers does not like to use the word by the way) is to separate it from that process which experiences it a separate brain correlate( consciousness itself). This is the importance of not going the route of satisfactory conclusion like Dennett does. That is not to negate any of his findings but it is the function not the thing that has been presented in his works. He is slightly moving to that conclusion from what I understand. Much of his ground breaking work is 15 year old or so.

Just as a 'pattern' does not exist as an attribute of the individual components organized into the pattern, but only in the relationships between them. So Biology is NOT reducible to Chemistry, which is NOT 'reducible' to quantum mechanics. The lower level descriptions define the underlying mechanics of the higher-level processes, but such processes are not necessarily uniquely dependent on the specific particle interactions. As we can envisage an alternate chemistry for life, or silicon 'minds'.

 TGB: Again we agree. But it is that irreducible pattern that is a content of consciousness that points to the fact that consciousness must be analysed itself. And  in fact it has been seen as a separate activation in the brain from that which is experienced ( such as pain, color) in some cases. I am not trying to be a hard ass but I think this area of needs precise focus and clarification I am not saying it ain't me that needs to understand it better. But this seems to be a legitimate clarification of the hard problem. Another thought experiment is replacing the brain's neurons one by one with the conscious individual telling the scientist whether he is feeling or thinking differently. If consciousness is an effect of functionality then there should be not difference through out the transfer. Consciousness is a physical state produced by the function and not the substance which functions.

PS I hate this  forum software.

EDITED for typos and clarity 5?18/11 6:19 EST

 

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