Are Qualia Real? Debate & Discussion

[Les Sleeth]

But I can tell what qualia you are having by examing their neural correlates, and I can tell what they are like on analogy with my own. . . . Your qualia are already external to me.

You can see my neurons do something, you cannot directly witness what my experience is (and direct observation is the issue). If I am painting a work of art, are you sharing my artistic experience first hand because you can see the brush move? No one is denying there are physical counterparts to consciousness, but that doesn't allow us to directly observe the fullness that is known in the quality of an experience.

But you yourself are dead against Denett's version. Is that becuae you think it is untrue, or what?

I am skeptical of it because his model doesn't explain how someone can still the mind and be conscious. According to his model, that should make someone un- or less conscious and it doesn't.

There is nothing homuncular in suggesting you, Les are present in a room. There is something very homuncular about suggesting there is a mini-Les inside Les's head, watching the world on a kind of TV. . . .
Just about everybody has dismissed it , and for good reasons. . . . So in addition to Les's intellect, imagination, emotions, there is a little Les
using them all ? But how could little Les use them without thoughts and desires of his own. Wouldn't it be simpler to say that your intellect, imagination, emotions are interacting with each other, and the total
process constitutes "you".

There is no little Les. There is Les, and the rest are not-Les. The intellect, imagination, emotions are "things" in the sense of having structure and parts. Les is something unstructured, integrated, whole, unified . . . he is the knowing feeling part at the heart of the mix, not the functions he can set in motion with the help of his brain. How do I know that?

If you cannot make your mind be still, then how do you know if it has a nature that only shows up when it isn’t moving? An analogy I’ve used before is to imagine consciousness is a barrel of water in the back of a pickup truck that is rolling along a rough country road. If all that conscious water had ever known was the sloshing, bouncing, vibrating, etc., that occurs on its surface, it might come to believe its nature is all that surface movement. But once the water becomes perfectly still, it sees it actually has depth, and that water, rather than movement, is its “essence.”

So you say. But one of the ways one would tell a real pond from a fake pond made of glass, is that the real pond can slosh. The people you call functionalists think consc. is all sloshing -- behavior. They cannot see the Hard Problem, because behaviour is readily explained physically. I think the sloshing and stillness -- behaviour and experience are both part of consc. so for me there is a Hard Problem.

You think consc. is all stillness and no sloshing. Does that mean you can solve the HP, or that for you there is no HP because consc. has nothing to do
with matter or the physical implementation ? . . . You still haven't made it clear whether this knowledge of "what consciousness IS" is supposed to be able to answer the Hard Problem.

Neither you nor functionalists can possibly know if consciousness shows itself in stillness unless you personally can achieve that (I don't think you are going to take my word for it ). I say you do not need to think or imagine or indulge in emotions to be conscious; all those "functions" can be made to be still and something yet remains, which one readily recognizes as "me." When one achieves that stillness, it becomes crystal clear that the "me" is what is initiating all the functions, even if most people can't control how/when they set them in motion.

You are right that the functions are very much tied to brain physiology, and that is exactly why studying them exclusively leads one to the conclusion that the brain is causing consciousness. Similarly, if one is caught up in the relentless functioning of the brain (which a being quite unconsciously is causing), then one comes to believe that self arises from that because functions are dominating for that person.

There is a "hard problem" only in terms of trying to explain consciousness without experiencing it apart from activity. I mean, I don't see Chalmers as much better in this respect except he allows for a non-physical explanation. But he still doesn't know a thing about what's behind the functions, and I say he never will until he can get his mind to stop trying to "think" the answer. The answer is not found in a thought or a concept (since thinking is a function), the answer is found in the experience of pure consciousness free from enslavement to the brain.

Of course, that doesn't tell us how consciousness is linked to the brain, or what its origin is, which seems to be what you are mostly interested in. I agree that is an interesting subject, I just don't agree that you are going to understand consciousness by studying the brain or the functions of consciousness.

 

[Steve Esser]

Hi Steve. Yes, I think my name should also be "neverlearnedenoughphysics".

I have a problem with saying that a "system of interactions" is having an experience. An "interaction" is not a substance of any kind. It is a relationship between a cause and an effect. There is no "thing" that is an interaction, it is purely informational. For example, if I push a table forward... there are two substances involved (we could get into the details of what happens on an atomic level... but I won't go there). The one substance is myself. The other is the table. The "push" is not a substance. Would it make sense to say that the "push" is having an experience?

A system of interactions, is just a system of relationships. There is no substance anywhere here either. There is no "thing".

It would be like saying the "arrangement" of books on a shelf is having an experience, whereas none of the books themselves are experiencing anything.

Am I a substance? Am I a thing of some kind? Yes, I'm certain of that. Every experience shows that I'm some "thing".

I'm trying out this way of thinking because:

1. I think "substance thinking" has completely failed on the mind/body question in the past. Descartes proposed substance dualism. Monistic responses to this were to say everything was matter (materialism) or everything was mind (idealism). All 3 of these approaches are fatally flawed, IMO.

2. Quantum physics gives us some motivation to question our common sense notion of inert matter and move toward an ontology based on events (or information transfer). (Maybe "event" is better than interaction - "interaction" does seem to imply that things are doing the interacting!). There are no static fundamental particles. The micro-level is one of quantum measurements =events.

In the case of pushing the table, the pushing is one (macro-level) event in a causal chain. The table and I are temporally extended systems which are distinguishable at the macro-level by virtue of some special stability or coordination in the causal chain of the micro-events involved.

 

[Tournesol]

You can see my neurons do something, you cannot directly witness what my experience is (and direct observation is the issue).

No, the issue is whether qualia are "absolutely private" -- that was your original claim. If they can be observed or inferred at all, they are not
absolutely private.

If I am painting a work of art, are you sharing my artistic experience first hand because you can see the brush move? No one is denying there are physical counterparts to consciousness, but that doesn't allow us to directly observe the fullness that is known in the quality of an experience.

Which means qualia are not entirely public -- not that they are entriely private.

I am skeptical of it because his model doesn't explain how someone can still the mind and be conscious. According to his model, that should make someone un- or less conscious and it doesn't.

Hypnagogue had a good reply to that in the Dennett/Buddha thread. Basically stilling the (conscious) mind is not stilling the brain. What we are conscious of is only a
small percentage of what is going on, and there is still plenty of brain activity when someone is meditating.

There is no little Les.

So there is no homunculus.

There is Les, and the rest are not-Les. The intellect, imagination, emotions are "things" in the sense of having structure and parts. Les is something unstructured, integrated, whole, unified . . . he is the knowing feeling part at the heart of the mix, not the functions he can set in motion with the help of his brain. How do I know that?

If he is "at the heart of the mix", he is a homunculus.

There is a "hard problem" only in terms of trying to explain consciousness without experiencing it apart from activity. I mean, I don't see Chalmers as much better in this respect except he allows for a non-physical explanation. But he still doesn't know a thing about what's behind the functions, and I say he never will until he can get his mind to stop trying to "think" the answer. The answer is not found in a thought or a concept (since thinking is a function), the answer is found in the experience of pure consciousness free from enslavement to the brain.

So there is no Hard Problem.

Of course, that doesn't tell us how consciousness is linked to the brain, or what its origin is, which seems to be what you are mostly interested in.

so there is a hard problem.

I agree that is an interesting subject, I just don't agree that you are going to understand consciousness by studying the brain or the functions of consciousness.

I don't think you are going to solve the HP by choosing to look at only
one side of the issue, whether it is the expereintial side or the functional side.

 

[Tournesol]

No. This is simply ignoring the nature of experience itself. There is something that is having an experience.

Objectively yes. But the "something" need not have a fully-devleoped sense of self, if you acept that infants nad animals have experiences.

 

[Tournesol]

And then there is dreaming...

 

[hypnagogue]

No, the issue is whether qualia are "absolutely private" -- that was your original claim. If they can be observed or inferred at all, they are not
absolutely private.

This is an interesting issue that deserves some further attention. In a sense, I agree with Les, in that the really interesting aspects of qualia-- the ineffible 'what it is like'-ness-- is an absolutely private phenomenon. If we suppose for a moment that there exists a non-conscious computer C that busily goes about studying the universe in the spirit of the scientific method, we might suppose that C could essentially duplicate existing human scientific knowledge, if it were ingenious enough. But I believe C would never have reason to suspect anything like subjective experience existing, as I believe the nature of subjective experience cannot be deduced from studying nature's effective causal patterns alone. In this sense, the essential aspect of what we mean by 'subjective experience' is necessarily blocked off from C, and so subjective experience has the flavor of absolute privacy for C.

However, there is another face to this issue that Tournesol brings up. As we are conscious, experiencing humans, we do have reason to suspect the existence of subjective experience. When we complement this private knowledge with third person methods, we find that in some strong sense, subjective experience systematically covaries with brain activity. (Of course, we have to take it on faith that in those human case studies that have revealed this relationship, the human participants themselves are (were) p-conscious, as we know ourselves to be in the first person case; but in the limit, we could remove this skepticism in theory by conducting fMRI studies, selective cortical stimulation, etc. on our own brains and making note of the systematic covariation that we would find.)

It is natural, then, to suppose that there is some mapping from the functional aspects of brain activity onto both the functional and qualitative aspects of experience. The general form of this mapping would be something like, 'functional pattern X in the brain correlates with functional and qualitative aspects Y of experience.' If this holds, then in a very real sense, studying the structure and function of the brain is studying the structure and function of p-consciousness. If we could know the mapping function for a particular brain, then we could deduce the organization of experience from the organization of the brain. Simply put, studying the brain would amount to studying experience 'from the outside'; we could not know the inner, subjective aspects of experience just from studying the brain, but it turns out that studying the brain amounts to studying experience nonetheless, albeit in a rather obtuse and impoverished manner. It would be somewhat analogous to studying a building from its blueprint, as opposed to actually entering the building and observing it first-hand. Going back to our non-conscious computer C, if C were to study my brain as I write this post, C would, in fact, be studying my subjective experience, although C could not know that this is the case-- that is, C would have no reason to suspect that there would be any qualitative goings-on that correspond to the purely functional / physical phenomena.

 

[loseyourname]

Are you arguing that pain is physical?

No:

I experience yellow, hot, and pain, not physical or non-physical.

I didn't put forth any argument as to whether pain is physical or non-physical. I just said that there is nothing within the contents of my experience that tells me what it is. There is only the experience. Concluding that the experience is either physical or non-physical requires reasoning. I did not conduct any reasoning of that nature in my post.

That doesn't make much sense to me. The causes of pain can be physical and can be invetigated by theorising, but how can the pain itself, without which any theory of its cause cannot get off the ground, be physical?

I don't know, but the simple fact that I don't know is of zero worth and does not help us to determine the truth of either proposition (that pain is physical and that pain is non-physical).

If it is then I'd want to ask what you mean by 'physical'?

I went over what I mean by the term in decent depth in Les' old thread on what it means for something to be physical. That's a start, but even then I don't believe that I have adequately captured the full meaning of the word.

 

[loseyourname]

I believe he's correct, that's always how I've understood qualia.

The definition is correct, I suppose. I just wasn't previously aware that that was the definition. Assuming it is, however, it now becomes an open question as to whether or not qualia exist. The only thing I know from experience is that experience exists. That alone does not tell me whether it is physical or non-physical.

I understand the argument, I just don't agree that reason is going to provide the final answer on this question. Rather, it is through deepening one's experience of consciousness that one understands the mysterious character we're labeling "qualia." I say you will never get it by thinking because you are missing information about the nature of consciousness which you can only acquire through experience itself.

Well, as I've said, all you can get from experience is that experience exists. Even if you manage to train yourself over the course of many years to empty that experience of all representational content, you are left only with experience (there is no name badge on it that says "Hi, I'm non-physical"). At least experience with representational content can tell you something about the physical object that causes that representational content - in fact, that is the basis of empirical investigation.

And the irony is, the more one tries to figure it out, the further away from knowing anything about it one becomes.

Presumably you mean that most people you've come into contact with that reason about consciousness end up further away from the conclusions you've come to. You, however, also came to those conclusions through reasoning, and it is audacious at least to suggest that the more a person's conclusion diverges from your own, the more incorrect it becomes.

 

[Les Sleeth]

Presumably you mean that most people you've come into contact with that reason about consciousness end up further away from the conclusions you've come to. You, however, also came to those conclusions through reasoning, and it is audacious at least to suggest that the more a person's conclusion diverges from your own, the more incorrect it becomes.

No, that's not what I mean. It has nothing to do with people disagreeing with me. The reason you might think that is because you are also incorrect that I've come to my conclusion about consciousness through reason.

I don't know how I can state more clearly than I already have (many times) that my views on consciousness have been shaped by what happens to my own consciousness when it becomes still. What I "see" in that experience is not included in any of the current descriptions of consciousness by those of you who are trying to "think" the answer.

What I experience when consciousness is still is something like a pool with a highly reflective surface. One can see that non-stop thinking distorts the clarity of the reflective surface, and hides just how deep the pool goes. I am not saying that thinking can't be helpful, or that I don't benefit from it myself. But I am of the opinion that the stillness needs to occur first to accurately reflect, and then thinking follows relying on what's been reflected. But if one cannot achieve stillness (and no one I know can do it who doesn't practice), then one never sees without the constant disturbance of thoughts.

In the case of contemplating the nature of consciousness itself, the ability to experience one's own consciousness in stillness is, I say, absolutely necessary to seeing what consciousness is. Until you stop the mind, you cannot possibly grasp what it is when it doesn't "function." Because you don't have control, your mind runs relentlessly, never shuts up, keeps going and going and going . . . so what you end up doing is studying what consciousness can do, and not what it is that's doing it.

That's why Tournesol doesn't "get" what I am saying about the "me" at the heart of functionality. He thinks he IS functionality because he can't stop it. And because he can't stop it, he is a slave to it, just like being trapped on a runaway train. Then, when people model consciousness, it reflects their own entrapment in that neuronal juggernaut, and so is hardly an unbiased model.

So I repeat, I believe it is futile to try to "figure out" the nature of consciousness sans stillness because not only does it not show up in the thinking process, the true nature of consciousness is actually obscured by thinking.

 

[Canute]

You spoke of the ability to "dissolve our higher cognitive functions," but I am not so sure that cognitive functions are "higher" than the pure experience of consciousness (i.e., still, inactive, but fully present). I seem to perceive and understand more when my mind is still than when the damn thing refuses to shut up.

Yes, funny that. This issue has come up on the Rosenberg thread in the guise of the question of whether non-cognitive experiences exist, and if so what they are like. If you don't mind I'll post this comment of yours over there as it's very relevant to the topic.

Obviously there is only one way to answer the question of whether non-cognitive experience are "higher" or "lower", or whether they exist and what they are like. This is to find out. Such experiences are, after all, by their very definition, experiences that anybody can have if they are conscious, since they are "non-cognitive", they do not require "higher cognitive functions" and therefore we can have them, if they exist, without our having to know anything about anything except what the non-cognitive experience itself is like. This is the sort ur-experience that underlies Rosenberg's argument for pan-experientialism. There is "something that it is like" but it is "non-cognitive".

Logically speaking a non-cognitive experience would be one in which ones mind was empty of thoughts, concepts, desires, attachments, distinctions, indications, and certainly any division of the world into subject and object. A very unusual state of experience and one that is fairly easy to define since it is empty of cognitive content. But does Rosenberg mention Samadi anywhere? I suspect he's never even heard of it.

 

[Les Sleeth]

Basically stilling the (conscious) mind is not stilling the brain. What we are conscious of is only a small percentage of what is going on, and there is still plenty of brain activity when someone is meditating.

The brain has a lot more to do than to help out with consciousness! To be alive a human needs the brain, so you aren't saying much with that observation.

Also, I don't think there is a lot known about those meditators who actually achieve 100% stillness. Most meditators are "casual" in the sense they are just trying to relax little. You don't achieve total stillness without lots of practice. I'd say the average casual meditator is still thinking like crazy, but maybe some percentage less than normal.

So there is no homunculus. . . . If he is "at the heart of the mix", he is a homunculus.

I find sneering at the homunculus concept rather opportunistic since no matter what one’s preferred theory is, something ends up running the show, whether it is physics, or brain physiology, or something we’ve not understood yet. At this site one can read:

“An homunculus is a 'little man'. It's evident that we don't literally have a small but fully-formed person in our heads controlling what we do, but some explanations of consciousness fail because they include a central observer which itself has all the mental properties a conscious person would have, in effect an homunculus. Explaining such a central person is obviously as difficult as explaining consciousness in the first place, and the hypothesis therefore does not get us very far.”

After labeling the concept ridiculous, someone may go ahead and use the idea anyway to help with their own theory. From the same article:

“Generally, however, homunculi are regarded as evidently absurd, and used mainly as a smear against other people's theories. Daniel Dennett is an unexpected exception here. No-one, in principle, is more hostile than Dennett to the idea of a central observer: Consciousness Explained repeatedly denounces the idea of the 'Cartesian Theatre', whose audience must surely be an homunculus (although the same book proposes a 'Joycean Narrator', and one might question whether the substitution of an Irish novel for a French play makes all that much difference). At the same time, Dennett has claimed that cognitive scientists frequently use homunculi in their tentative theories, and that their practice demonstrates that it is alright to do so.”

I remember reading Dennett's concept of the Joycean Narrator and thinking he’d put the little man back in the brain, similar to http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/unconscious-homunculus.html effort by Crick an Koch to posit an unconscious homunculus:

“. . . Fred Attneave . . . lists two kinds of objections to a homunculus. The first is an aversion to dualism . . . The second has to do with the supposed regressive nature of the concept . . . We all have this illusion of a homunculus inside the brain (that’s what "I" am), so this illusion needs an explanation. The problem of the infinite regress is avoided in our case, since the true homunculus is unconscious, and only a representation of it enters consciousness. This puts the problem of consciousness in a somewhat new light. We have therefore named this type of theory as one postulating an unconscious homunculus, wherever it may be located in the brain. The unconscious homunculus receives information about the world through the senses and thinks, plans and executes voluntary actions. What becomes conscious then is a representation of some of the activities of the unconscious homunculus in the form of various kinds of imagery and spoken and unspoken speech.”

A central controller concept doesn’t have to fall victim to infinite regress or duality. For example, with the concepts of integration and substance monism, the problem can easily be avoided. In such a model the central controller, “me,” is something that results from the constant unification of an individual’s experiences. That integrative operation creates a sort of “conscious singularity” at the core which can exert its will, accept information and know, but can’t itself do anything multipart (since it can only function as “one”). Substance monism is required to explain how non-singular conscious functions (like the intellect) are really the same “stuff” as consciousness, but rather than integrating when operating, operate instead in multipart and structured ways. The possibility of some type of homunculur theory is what the first article above suggests:

“The normal argument, in fact, is that homuncular arguments actually fall into an infinite regress, with the consciousness of each homunculus explained by ever smaller homunculini, nested like Russian dolls: but in fact this only applies to the hard-line homuncularist position that homunculi are the only possible explanation of consciousness. One can still believe that there is, as a matter of fact, an homunculus who is responsible for our consciousness, but that his consciousness is explained on some other basis. Most would agree, after all that there is a central entity inside us which does all the thinking - namely the brain.”

So I must repeat, when one manages to still his mind, one clearly see there actually is an integrating aspect, and in fact that aspect is exactly what one learns to take advantage of to still the mind. That is why someone who experiences stillness comes to believe wholly “multipart” models are missing an aspect.

 

[Les Sleeth]

Yes, funny that. This issue has come up on the Rosenberg thread in the guise of the question of whether non-cognitive experiences exist, and if so what they are like. If you don't mind I'll post this comment of yours over there as it's very relevant to the topic.

Sure, go ahead.

Logically speaking a non-cognitive experience would be one in which ones mind was empty of thoughts, concepts, desires, attachments, distinctions, indications, and certainly any division of the world into subject and object. A very unusual state of experience and one that is fairly easy to define since it is empty of cognitive content.

If cognition is defined as the Wikipedia does, "The sort of mental processes described as cognitive or cognitive processes are largely influenced by research which has successfully used this paradigm in the past. Consequently this description tends to apply to processes such as memory, attention, perception, action, problem solving and mental imagery," then i have a hard time with the term "non-cognitive" being applied to what consciousness experiences in stillness.

Because that definition includes perception, then I'd have to say in conscious stillness I am more aware of what is going on around me than at any other time (by far!) . . . I'm just not thinking or imaging about it. When I do think, solve problems, etc. it is sort of done in short bursts rather than as non-stop thinking so I can maintain the priority of stillness. So it is hard for me to call that non-cognitive . . . if anything to me it is super-cognitive.

But does Rosenberg mention Samadi anywhere? I suspect he's never even heard of it.

You can probably bet your farm on it.

 

[loseyourname]

I don't know how I can state more clearly than I already have (many times) that my views on consciousness have been shaped by what happens to my own consciousness when it becomes still.

I accept that, but your conclusions come to you through reasoning. That is quite simply the only way that humans come to conclusions. You experience whatever it is that you experience when your consciousness becomes still, and sitting here typing, after you've thought about it, you have certain ideas about what that experience means. The meaning is not contained within the experience itself any more than the word "red" is contained within the experience of seeing something red. There is no such thing, for humans at least, as non-theoretical empiricism.

What I "see" in that experience is not included in any of the current descriptions of consciousness by those of you who are trying to "think" the answer.

Those of who? I'm not a consciousness researcher. My interest in this topic is purely peripheral. I read up on the current topics and evaluate the arguments presented. You are presenting the proposition (I'm not sure that you've made an argument other than "trust me, I can do it") that you are capable of coming to conclusions without reasoning. I'm never going to believe you because, simply put, that is not the way that human cognition works. Even epiphanies of intuition are the result of underlying reasoning processes that we are just not aware of. Even if you come to a conclusion based purely on a leap of faith (I'm not suggesting you are doing so in this case), you have still come to the conclusion that doing so is acceptable through some reasoning process.

What I experience when consciousness is still is something like a pool with a highly reflective surface. One can see that non-stop thinking distorts the clarity of the reflective surface, and hides just how deep the pool goes. I am not saying that thinking can't be helpful, or that I don't benefit from it myself. But I am of the opinion that the stillness needs to occur first to accurately reflect, and then thinking follows relying on what's been reflected. But if one cannot achieve stillness (and no one I know can do it who doesn't practice), then one never sees without the constant disturbance of thoughts.

I don't disagree with any of this, and I'm glad that you just admitted that you must reflect on your experience in order to come to any conclusions about it. Reflection is a reasoning process.

In the case of contemplating the nature of consciousness itself, the ability to experience one's own consciousness in stillness is, I say, absolutely necessary to seeing what consciousness is.

Even there I might agree with you, with the caveat that I don't feel it is possible to "see" what consciousness is. You simply see what you see, and then reason about its nature. You cannot simply, in the complete absence of theory or cognition, directly apprehend the nature of your experience. You can apprehend only the experience itself.

That's why Tournesol doesn't "get" what I am saying about the "me" at the heart of functionality.

I haven't been following the exchange, so at this point, I'm not too concerned with what Tournesol thinks. Maybe I'll take a look if I get a chance.

So I repeat, I believe it is futile to try to "figure out" the nature of consciousness sans stillness because not only does it not show up in the thinking process, the true nature of consciousness is actually obscured by thinking.

Then stop thinking about it. Just enjoy the experience and quit trying to tell it what it is or isn't.

 

[hypnagogue]

Logically speaking a non-cognitive experience would be one in which ones mind was empty of thoughts, concepts, desires, attachments, distinctions, indications, and certainly any division of the world into subject and object.

Cognition is not so much about what is apparent in our minds, but about what our brains do. There are all sorts of evidence for the existence of various cognitive functions that operate on a subconsciouslevel. I think a better definition of 'non-cognitive experience' would be experience that is not modulated by/correlated with cognitive activity, where cognitive activity is understood to be a class of functional relationships that can be entirely studied and understood from the third person. On this definition, it is not really plausible to claim that a human could have non-cognitive experience.

 

[Canute]

Cognition is not so much about what is apparent in our minds, but about what our brains do. There are all sorts of evidence for the existence of various cognitive functions that operate on a subconsciouslevel. I think a better definition of 'non-cognitive experience' would be experience that is not modulated by/correlated with cognitive activity, where cognitive activity is understood to be a class of functional relationships that can be entirely studied and understood from the third person. On this definition, it is not really plausible to claim that a human could have non-cognitive experience.

I can't follow that argument. Why is it not plausible?

I'm assuming that whether a non-cognitive experience is possible or not depends entirely on how "cognitive" is defined. If it is defined as you suggest here, as "functional relationships that can be entirely studied and understood from the third person" then I would have thought that it is quite easy to have non-cognitive experiences. By this definition wouldn't all qualia have to be deemed non-cognitive? Or have I misunderstood your definition?

 

[Tournesol]

This is an interesting issue that deserves some further attention. In a sense, I agree with Les, in that the really interesting aspects of qualia-- the ineffible 'what it is like'-ness-- is an absolutely private phenomenon.

To say that it is *absolutely* private implies that there is no
way of communciating it at all. It is often observed that we could
ahve no idea of what Martian qualia are like , but by the same token
we don't know how Martian communication works. Martians may
be able to communicate their what-it-is-like perfectly succesfully.
Since we have no idea what the limits of communication are, we
are in no position to assert that qualia are *absolutely* ineffable.

And without *absolute* ineffability, there is no temptation towards
an *ontological* basis for qualia -- there is no need for mind-stuff or spirit.

Going back to our non-conscious computer C, if C were to study my brain as I write this post, C would, in fact, be studying my subjective experience, although C could not know that this is the case-- that is, C would have no reason to suspect that there would be any qualitative goings-on that correspond to the purely functional / physical phenomena.

If C studied the phenomena related to the exchange of metal discs and paper
rectangles, C would be studying money -- but would C *know* that ?

 

[Les Sleeth]

I accept that, but your conclusions come to you through reasoning. That is quite simply the only way that humans come to conclusions.

Wrong. You don't know what you are talking about if you cannot achieve the stillness to which I refer. You are just talking about what you are capable of with a rampaging brain. It is YOU who cannot understand any other way, and so you project that onto every potential of consciousness.

You experience whatever it is that you experience when your consciousness becomes still, and sitting here typing, after you've thought about it, you have certain ideas about what that experience means.

Wrong again. I understand little about it by thinking, I am communicating in concepts so you might get a sense of it. I personally don't need or want any concepts in the way when I'm trying to see what it is.

The meaning is not contained within the experience itself any more than the word "red" is contained within the experience of seeing something red. There is no such thing, for humans at least, as non-theoretical empiricism.

Wrong once again. The vast majority of meaning is found in the experience of stillness. Once I leave it, there is meager meaning, mostly just memory and concepts about it. The experience is where the meaning is, where the realization is, where the understanding is.

Those of who? I'm not a consciousness researcher. My interest in this topic is purely peripheral. I read up on the current topics and evaluate the arguments presented.

I didn't say you were a consciousness researcher, but everything you say about consciousness, as you did above (and do below), represents aspects of a model you apparently embrace.

. . . I'm not sure that you've made an argument other than "trust me, I can do it" . . .

Give me a break. I've made the case a hundred times here at PF. What I have said is that YOU cannot know if I am speaking accurately until YOU yourself achieve stillness. Unless you do, it is all speculation and guesswork on your part. I cannot inject my experience into you, I cannot prove it exists to others. I can only prove it to myself because it is a 100% subjective attainment.

You are presenting the proposition . . . that you are capable of coming to conclusions without reasoning. I'm never going to believe you because, simply put, that is not the way that human cognition works.

Again, your conclusion stems from how you can make YOUR cognition work. If you took the time to study the history of human consciousness development, you would see there is a long history of people practicing stillness, reporting the experience of direct non-thinking cognition and, in fact, claiming it produces superior understanding to thinking cognition. But of course, you are free to believe whatever you want in ignorance.

Even epiphanies of intuition are the result of underlying reasoning processes that we are just not aware of. Even if you come to a conclusion based purely on a leap of faith (I'm not suggesting you are doing so in this case), you have still come to the conclusion that doing so is acceptable through some reasoning process.

You just can't seem to admit there might a consciousness potential you know nothing about can you.

I don't disagree with any of this, and I'm glad that you just admitted that you must reflect on your experience in order to come to any conclusions about it. Reflection is a reasoning process.

Reflection for you might only be a reasoning process, but for those of us who can still the mind, another type of reflection becomes possible. But hell no, I must be making that up because if YOU can't reflect without reason, then nobody can, right?

Even there I might agree with you, with the caveat that I don't feel it is possible to "see" what consciousness is. You simply see what you see, and then reason about its nature. You cannot simply, in the complete absence of theory or cognition, directly apprehend the nature of your experience. You can apprehend only the experience itself.

Its amazing to hear someone speak so authoritatively when lacking any education on the subject of stillness! The term "see" is in fact often used to describe exactly how one contemplates and reflects on the nature of things in stillness. Read Castenada's "Journey to Ixtland" for an interesting portrayal of someone learning to "see."

Then stop thinking about it. Just enjoy the experience and quit trying to tell it what it is or isn't.

Why do I have to bow out of thinking exercises, which is what philosophy is, to posit another way of understanding reality in general, and consciousness specifically? I've never said thinking hasn't value. I am simply saying that it isn't the only kind of cognition consciousness can do, while you've been saying thinking is the only kind of worthwhile cognition because it's all you are capable of. Egocentric reasoning seldom makes for good philosophy.

 

[learningphysics]

Hello learningphysics (my name could be "neverlearnedenoughphysics").
To make sense of such a system being distinguishable within the larger network of the world, we must supplement our usual notion of micro-level physical causality (one billiard ball effecting the next) with another aspect of causation -- a binding or coordinating aspect. With this new fuller concept of causality in place, I then speculate that to the human system in question, this coordinating aspect of causality is felt as experience.
(Am I far out enough on a limb now?).

Hi Steve. Can you talk a little bit more about this coordinating aspect? As you said something needs to be added to make the human system distinguishable from the rest of the world.

What is the nature of this coordinating aspect? Why does it not appear everywhere in the world?

 

[Les Sleeth]

To say that it is *absolutely* private implies that there is no way of communciating it at all.

I know this is not addressed to me, but it started with my statement about qualia being absolutely private.

I have been saying there is a difference between the concept of something and the experience of it. A concept is analogous to a painting of Yosemite Valley in that a painting might give a sense of something, but it can never be said to actually be Yosemite Valley or when viewed, to be the experience of Yosemite Valley.

Likewise, a concept of my experience of the quality red is possible, but my internal experience is not open to your direct experience. It is only open to me. I might share with you conceptually the best I can "what it's like," but that doesn't mean you were inside my consciousness and experienced my qualia. And you never will because it is absolutely private in that sense.

I haven't said there is no way of communicating about it; that's what communication is . . . i.e., conceptual approximations. But "aboutness" is not my actual experience and cannot be transferred into your consciousness. If we both listen to a Mozart piano concerto, we can never objectively prove that our experiences were exactly the same. We just do the best we can through communication by approximating what it was like for each of us.

Since we have no idea what the limits of communication are, we are in no position to assert that qualia are absolutely* ineffable.

But we do have an idea of what communication limits are. Do you live in this world or not? I don't know about you, but except for the simplist ideas, I have difficulty getting people to understand what I mean (and my profession in my former life was communication director). For anything meaningful, I have to work at it, and come at it from different directions.

Recently I was trying to decribe to a fellow cooking enthusiast the concept for a pizza I've been developing for the last two years. In this pizza I use tomatoes from a manufacturer who vine ripens them, grinds them without blanching or adding citric acid, and cans them within hours of picking. Because heat (e.g., to blanch) and citric acid sour tomatoes, this technique gives really fresh flavor. To get the herbs and garlic flavors in without cooking, I have to do several steps that involve loads of undried herbs and layering.

Anyway, my friend and I talked for an hour about what a difference this can make to taste, but I could see she wasn't sure. Why? I told her every little detail, I explained in depth, I created vivid images in her mind of the process and the taste, we both are really into cooking and taste . . . but still she didn't know. A week later I brought her some of that pizza. She ate once piece and started shaking her head yes. Interestingly, I wouldn't have had to say a word to her about what that pizza "was like" and she still could have grasped it qualitatively the minute she tasted it (supporting my point that we fully experience thinking, but we can't comprehensively think experience).

So, is there a limitation to communciation? Of course! Can the experience of qualia be wholly communicated and known conceptually exactly as experience "knows" it? No freakin' way.

And without *absolute* ineffability, there is no temptation towards an *ontological* basis for qualia -- there is no need for mind-stuff or spirit.

Your statement seems non sequitur to me. To say an experience is not fully reproduced by communication simply demonstrates the limitations of conceptualization. Yes, qualia are conceptually ineffable, but they are not experientially ineffable. We are back to this problem that you do not seem to distinguish your conceptual mind from the direct experience of reality.

 

[Tournesol]

Likewise, a concept of my experience of the quality red is possible, but my internal experience is not open to your direct experience. It is only open to me. I might share with you conceptually the best I can "what it's like," but that doesn't mean you were inside my consciousness and experienced my qualia. And you never will because it is absolutely private in that sense.

It can't be absolutely private unless there is no possible
way of communicating it in the widest sense of "possible'; you have not shown this, only that it cannot be communicated with the means at that happen to be at our disposal.

But we do have an idea of what communication limits are. Do you live in this world or not?

We have an idea about the limits we operate under in this world But those
limits are relative to this world and therefore not absolute. We don't
know what the limits are for other species or our remote descendents. That being the case, we are in no position to assert inefability as an intrinisc property of
qualia per se, rather than something that arises partly out of limitations of communication,

So, is there a limitation to communciation? Of course! Can the experience of qualia be wholly communicated and known conceptually exactly as experience "knows" it? No freakin' way.

As ever, I have no problem with the common-sense issues of ineffability. I am just
trying to find out what you think justifies the word "absolutely".

Your statement seems non sequitur to me. To say an experience is not fully reproduced by communication simply demonstrates the limitations of conceptualization. Yes, qualia are conceptually ineffable, but they are not experientially ineffable. We are back to this problem that you do not seem to distinguish your conceptual mind from the direct experience of reality.

No we are not. But there is a hint of an answer to the real question. You seem
to be saying that all communication is based on concepts and there is something about concepts that is inherently incompatible with qualia: IOW

a) all communication is necessaily conceptual

b) all concepts are necessarily incapable of capturing phenomenal feels

c) therefore, it is absolutely impossible to communicate phenomenal feels.​

(b) is quite doubtful, since it is plausible that we at least partly think with
the aid of mental images, which obviously *do* have phenomenal feels. (How do you plan a new recipe without "tasting", in an imaginary way, the dish
you are aiming for ?)

OTOH, this does take on the required air of necessity, and hence absoluteness
if (b) is amended to

b) structural-and-functional (Kant's "empirically empty") concepts are necessarily incapable of capturing phenomenal feels

which is just the line I have been taking.

 

[Les Sleeth]

It can't be absolutely private unless there is no possible way of communicating it in the widest sense of "possible'; you have not shown this, only that it cannot be communicated with the means at that happen to be at our disposal.

It is a simple proposition, and hardly worthy of all this intellectual sparring. All I mean is the actual, exact moment of the experience is an internally private moment for that moment. I've never said a person is incapable of communicating some sense of the experience, which would be a silly statement to make since people constantly communicate about their experiences. However, I don't buy your point about communication in the slightest (explained below).

We have an idea about the limits we operate under in this world But those limits are relative to this world and therefore not absolute. We don't know what the limits are for other species or our remote descendents. That being the case, we are in no position to assert inefability as an intrinisc property of qualia per se, rather than something that arises partly out of limitations of communication.

As of now, there is no known species capable of that so it is pointless to speculate. Why not keep it real and talk about what we know and are interested in, which is humanity? If some species could share my consciousness with me, and exprience what I do in the moment of the experience, then obviously my experience loses the trait of privacy. That and that alone is what destroys privacy.

But it doesn't follow that communication eliminates privacy, even if, say, by some psychic means I could transfer my experience into your consciousness and you would then experience exactly what I did. That does not cancel the fact that I experience privately in the first place, plus I can choose not to communicate.

As ever, I have no problem with the common-sense issues of ineffability. I am just trying to find out what you think justifies the word "absolutely".

As I stated above, I mean the actual, exact moment of the experience is an internally private moment for that moment.

You seem to be saying that all communication is based on concepts and there is something about concepts that is inherently incompatible with qualia

In incompatible, just completely different processes. A concept of something is not and can never be equivalent to the experience of the same thing.

IOW

a) all communication is necessaily conceptual

b) all concepts are necessarily incapable of capturing phenomenal feels

c) therefore, it is absolutely impossible to communicate phenomenal feels.​

(b) is quite doubtful, since it is plausible that we at least partly think with
the aid of mental images, which obviously *do* have phenomenal feels. (How do you plan a new recipe without "tasting", in an imaginary way, the dish
you are aiming for ?)

I don't think all communication is necessarily conceptual, I just thought we were talking about concepts versus experience. But even so, if, for instance, you were to empathically pick up on what I am experiencing, it is not itself a precise recreation of my experience in your consciousness . . . it is just a "sense" of it. More importantly, the communication ihappens after the fact of my experience which occurred in private.

You example of "tasting in an imaginary way" to get around my assertion that "all concepts are necessarily incapable of capturing phenomenal feels" doesn't do it. Again, I've never said some sense cannot be communicated or sensed by another. I am saying the actual, exact moment of the experience is an internally private moment for that moment, and that experience is a different animal than concepts or imagination and not fully/equivalently replicated by either.

Now, it's true that we can stimulate an experience with memory or mental imaging, like if we were to recall the experience of some taste, but that doesn't change the fact that the image is the image, and the experience is the experience . . . two different things even if one can bring on the other.

 

[Tournesol]

It is a simple proposition, and hardly worthy of all this intellectual sparring. All I mean is the actual, exact moment of the experience is an internally private moment for that moment. I've never said a person is incapable of communicating some sense of the experience, which would be a silly statement to make since people constantly communicate about their experiences.

So you meant soemthing else by "absolutely private".

As of now, there is no known species capable of that so it is pointless to speculate. Why not keep it real and talk about what we know and are interested in, which is humanity?

If we are interested in what consciousness is, we need to know which
features are absolute and necessary, and which contngent and relative.

If some species could share my consciousness with me, and exprience what I do in the moment of the experience, then obviously my experience loses the trait of privacy. That and that alone is what destroys privacy.

Which tells us something about qualia; privacy is not a charactersitics of qualia per se, but exists in relation to various other factors.

In incompatible, just completely different processes. A concept of something is not and can never be equivalent to the experience of the same thing.

Is that an absolute ?

I don't think all communication is necessarily conceptual, I just thought we were talking about concepts versus experience. But even so, if, for instance, you were to empathically pick up on what I am experiencing, it is not itself a precise recreation of my experience in your consciousness . . . it is just a "sense" of it.

Whether it is or not is of course contigent on my empathic abilities.

 

[moving finger]

There is no way to prove they exist from third person methods alone, but many philosophers argue that we can know about them from the first person. I'm wondering who here thinks these are real and who thinks they are a delusion. For those who think they aren't real, do you at least admit that it seems like they are, but just feel that this intuition is wrong? And for those who do believe in them, do you think science will ever be able to account for their existence and/or specific (intrinsic) properties?

Pardon my question, but I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you mean by the question : "are they real?"
Can you first please define exactly what you mean by "real"?

I guess the question is not the same as
1 Do sensory experiences have subjective properties?
(to which I hope all conscious and perceptive agents would answer "yes"?)

Does it mean
2 Do these subjective properties have a physical embodiment?
(to which I hope all conscious and perceptive agents would also answer "yes"? - otherwise how could the subjective properties have any interaction with our physical consciousness?)

Or does it mean
3 Does the physical embodiment of these subjective properties exist independently of the conscious substrate, and identical in all brains/consciousnesses?
(to which I would answer "no")

Perhaps someone can clarify whether it is question 1, 2, 3 above, or another question, that is being asked?

MF

 

[Tournesol]

What do you mean by "conscious substrate" ?

 

[selfAdjoint]

Does it mean
2 Do these subjective properties have a physical embodiment?
(to which I hope all conscious and perceptive agents would also answer "yes"? - otherwise how could the subjective properties have any interaction with our physical consciousness?)

Or does it mean
3 Does the physical embodiment of these subjective properties exist independently of the conscious substrate, and identical in all brains/consciousnesses?
(to which I would answer "no")

I think it is interpreted to mean "qualia are capable of causal actions." Philosophers seem to be able to abstract everything from the world except cause.

 

[moving finger]

I think it is interpreted to mean "qualia are capable of causal actions." Philosophers seem to be able to abstract everything from the world except cause.

Interesting. I hope StatusX drops in and let's us have his thoughts, it was his original post and poll after all (and I see no point in having a poll unless all the participants agree on the definition of the thing being polled!).

I would argue that all qualia have a physical embodiment (even if it just a neural pattern in the brain), therefore in that sense they must be also capable of "causation" (ie that pattern can have causal effects on other patterns and on behaviour); but I do not believe the neural pattern for "red" for example is unique, it will vary from one individual to another, and neither does that pattern have any meaning or relevance outside of the individual neural context, therefore I am not sure what the question "are qualia real" is really asking?

 

[moving finger]

What do you mean by "conscious substrate" ?

in the case of humans, I mean the neural patterns that give rise to ("cause" if you like) the emergent phenomenon of human consciousness

MF

 

[Tournesol]

but I do not believe the neural pattern for "red" for example is unique, it will vary from one individual to another, and neither does that pattern have any meaning or relevance outside of the individual neural context,

Meaning it varies above and beyond the variation of neural substrate -- so that
even twins or clones could have radically different qualia ?

If you do think that -- why ?

therefore I am not sure what the question "are qualia real" is really asking?

Surely the idea that qualia have a high degree of independence from their physical basis would weigh in favour of their reality.

 

[Tournesol]

in the case of humans, I mean the neural patterns that give rise to ("cause" if you like) the emergent phenomenon of human consciousness

MF

If the 'conscious substrate' is by definition what causes qualia, it immediately
follows that they can't exist independently -- there is no question about it.

 

[Steve Esser]

Hi Steve. Can you talk a little bit more about this coordinating aspect? As you said something needs to be added to make the human system distinguishable from the rest of the world.

What is the nature of this coordinating aspect? Why does it not appear everywhere in the world?

Hi. I was off-line for the last week and I'm trying to catch up.
I don't have my own detailed theory of this, and everything I'm saying here is extremely speculative (A discussion of a detailed causal model which ends up with something like this characteristic is the subject of Gregg Rosenberg's book in the other thread). I have "backed into" some thoughts about what a new theory of causality should feature by looking at what is missing from the conventional view. Complex systems like humans resist reduction to simple microphysical causation. Such systems seem to take advantage of a coordinating causal property. I do think the potential to utilize such a property must be everywhere in the world, but only certain evolutionary causal paths will lead to systems which end up featuring the coordination aspect to a high degree.