/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9289317
Good, but posting those words is like saying "beetlejuice" three times for pseudointellectuals. Hurry and delete this thread.

Whatever the answer is, we can all agree that dualism is bullshit, correct?

>>9289317
Correct. It's incredibly egotistical how these "hard problem" people are convinced their own compelled belief in sensory input as some "experience" thing in itself is a literal indication of some aspect of reality that physics is missing. Instead of the obvious alternative explanation that we're just prone to having a useful belief in something that isn't literally true. Like somehow they've convinced themselves it's impossible for the brain to ever work in terms of convenient fictions.

>>9289326
Hate to break it to you, mr. folk psychologist, Qualia doesn't exist

>>9289335
He's agreeing with you and saying it's going to attract the people you two don't agree with by triggering them with the truth. He's saying delete the thread so you don't have to deal with these incoming brainlets, not because you're wrong.

>>9289341

Hmm I'm dumb as shit

>>9289341
brainlet here, please explain in more detail

>>9289334
No you brainlet,close but not right.

It's an illusion in part, in fact, consciousness is the only thing that can see an illusion as real. Only consciousness can look at pic related and model an object which is impossible.

So consciousness is based in illusion, but that does not mean it isn't real. Ultimately, color is real, sound is real, etc. We haven't figured out how to model it correctly yet, but that does not mean it doesn't have real existence, material physical existence. It exists as expressed by the interaction of information in the brain, the same way the universe exists as expressed by the interaction of information making up the fundamental particles.
Consciousness is some kind of real byproduct of the interaction of information. The more complex and correlated the system (for example having eyes with high "framerate" vision tied in with short to long term memory and intelligence to generalize and analyze and form a complex model of the surrounding environment as well as internal environment) the more likelyhood there is strong consciousness.
I'd say that for computers especially neural nets, and especially those mixing visual and verbal dialogue, are approaching higher and higher levels of consciousness. I believe this will be proved shortly after a strong theory of consciousness has been established. I'm not suggesting they have minds, but that they are getting closer and closer as the components of a mind are becoming easy to compute.

>>9289747
>in fact, consciousness is the only thing that can see an illusion as real
Nope.
http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling
Also none of what you're talking about needs to involve "qualia" being literally present. All that's required is the behavior of responding to those illusions as though they weren't illusions. It's enough to behave and report as though you're "experiencing qualia" like your examples of color or sound. No literal phantasms of "experience" need ever actually appear and no deeper new science of "qualia" is required unless you insist on overrating the literal reality of your compelled belief and behavior in these situations. It's way less of a leap to just accept that you only believe you're "really experiencing" something rather than overhauling physics because of how real you're compelled to believe / report the alleged phenomena are. Intensity of belief doesn't constitute much evidence that belief is true instead of just a useful fictional reference point for behavior.

>>9289747
I suspect such objects are modelled piecewise by the brain, rather than the whole impossible object being modelled at once.

>>9289775
This is a hell of way to rationalize that you're not experiencing what you're experiencing.

>>9289789
It's a way more reasonable explanation then the notion we *are* literally "experiencing" things just because we have the behavior of treating sensory input as though they were real world objects in themselves.
If you were going to build a robot that made use of information from a mounted camera to navigate around its environment, you would do it in exactly that way, by having it behave in response to information rather than by coming up with some way to make magic image objects literally appear to it.
There is never any example of "qualia" you can point to that is beyond a mundane physics compatible explanation in terms of behavior. There's nothing mysterious or magical about making use of behavior based around fictional reference points.

>>9289804
It's not.

It's pratting around.

You are experiencing the world. Whether or not you're experiencing that world freely (You're not, that's all compelled behaviour) is irrelevant. You have an interior life.

>>9289804
It's so amusing that you can be so divorced from observation that you can rationalize you're not observing anything at all. I mean maybe you don't have an interior life, maybe you're effectively clockwork, but I certainly do.

>>9289317

Only un-endowed strict materialist onanists could deny the most intuitive truth possible: what you experience by its very ontology must exists in that subjective sense as it appears to you. By denying this obvious part of reality, they are either falling prey to some form of 'scientistic' mind-virus, possess a far too low IQ to comprehend epistemological arguments, are perhaps manifestations of a Demiurge, or lack some critical gene responsible for creating subjective experiences; hence being essentially automata. All of these scenarios are best dealt with through emergency testosterone therapy, precautionary neutering, and micro-dosing of LSD. As these 'people' believe they are simply pure information, throwing rocks in their general direction has no moral implications.

>>9289334
got any scientific proof to back that up? :^)
and no, what you think is not what is fact, so don't give me that "hurr, well its just an illusion, its not real because i said so" >:^(

>>9289812
>You have an interior life
You behave as though you have an interior life. You don't know that there actually is some extra special class of real world objects that make that interior life up just because you're an organism under the impression that these things are really there. It would be a lot less of a stretch to not make that additional assumption that your behavior is an indication of some extra variety of real world objects in need of a new science to explain.
>I mean maybe you don't have an interior, maybe you're effectively clockwork, but I certainly do.
You have no way of ever knowing whether you have an actual "interior" or just believe that you have one. The latter explanation has the benefit of making sense within the bounds of how all other physical phenomena work. There's no reason to believe we're exceptions to physical reality just because you have the behavior of treating sensory inputs as though they were real.

>>9289812
>>9289819
he already addressed your disbelief here >>9289334

>>9289836
You don't need proof to refrain from making a needless additional assumption about magic being real. When you stop making that assumption there's some magical super-physical thing in need of explaining, what you're left with is ordinary physical bodies behaving in ordinary physics compliant ways. You don't need proof to not disagree with physics.

>>9289826
lol

>>9289844
This is just pratting around with semantics.

Under your understanding of my "Belief" I don't in fact have an interior life and am merely reporting to you (Who also lacks the interior life to observe this but merely functions as though you do) that I do.

However, I do in fact have an interior life, I am observing my own behaviour. I can't prove that to you, but I do.

>>9289859
he does have and observes his interior life, however he isnt such as a brainlet and realizes that the interior life is simply an amalgam of sensory inputs.

>>9289859
>I can't prove that to you
You can't prove it to yourself either.
>semantics
No. It's not at all a semantics difference when the alternative to what I'm talking about is people believing there's some extra-physical phenomenon of "qualia" that is going to one day be explained through updates to physics and chemistry. That's as far from a semantics difference as anything else you could ever come up with. This is the difference between accepting the world as it is vs. insisting we need a radically different new science to solve this "problem"

>mfw I've made a career out of avoiding criticism by using slippery semantics

>>9289844
>You have no way of ever knowing whether you have an actual "interior" or just believe that you have one

Wrong, I do know whether or not I have an interior life, because I am observing the world rather than a dead machine reporting information to you, I am aware of my own actions, thoughts, imaginations.

This awareness is what consists an interior life.

I can never be aware if anyone else has a similar experience, because I am limited exclusively to my own. But I can be sure of my own awareness.

>>9289864
solipsists are the lowest of low.

>>9289317

Hurr durr we can't believe in qualia, because that assumes a new science. I'm just going to herp my derp and ignore that all science was at some point new mwuaaa and that we have no evidence that qualia are merely beliefs. *rhythmical rocking motions* In fact everything is accounted for by behaviourism because assuming more complex brain processing would require more assumptions. Language is just a Pavlovian conditioned reflex *drools*

>>9289861
He's not saying that whatsoever.

He's saying that no interior life existing and that we simply believe we do.

But in order to hold a belief and observe that belief and be aware of that belief we'd have to have the capacity to observe the world, somethine he's denying in favour of believing we're simply automatons.

>>9289869
automatons can think that they aren't automatons. nonmaterialists have deluded themselves thinking that they're above the matter.

>>9289867
qualia does not exist in empiricism at all.

>>9289862
> people believing there's some extra-physical phenomenon of "qualia"

There's no reason not to suppose that when the alternative is literally rejecting

>I think therefore I am

What you are literally suggesting is that you shouldn't have an interior life whatsoever, all of the colour you observe, all of the thoughts you have you shouldn't be aware of, you should simply move in the same way that clockwork does, unaware of your own motion.

>>9289875
No, you don't get it.

Automatons don't think at all, they don't observe the world, they just move.

They do not require "Thought" as you understand it in the same way a clock doesn't.

Thinking as you and I understand it can be more accurately understood as "Being aware of my own thoughts" but an automaton can simply move, no awareness required because intelligence is seperate from awareness. There would be nothing to convince yourself of because to an unaware machine the concept of self-awareness is a nonsense.

>>9289875
"Intelligence" can be reduced to a number of operations and movements by objects in the world, it doesn't require awareness in the same way a clock doesn't, it simply moves.

>>9289864
>I *believe* I know whether or not I have an interior life
>I *believe* I am observing the world rather than a dead machine reporting information to you
Fixed that for you.
>I am aware of my own actions, thoughts, imaginations.
This depends on your definition of "awareness." You certainly are able to reference and report on both your own real world physical behavior and on the non-real convenient fictional reference points your brain works in terms of e.g. thoughts / imaginations. This doesn't require "qualia" as a literal thing that's appearing to you, it only requires that you have behavior in response to information.
Also calling that "dead" just shows you're having emotionally charged reactions to this topic. That's the real "problem" that comes up with this topic, people like you are so attached to the idea everything you think you "experience" must be an indication of reality as it is that nothing will ever change your mind no matter how much time and research has been poured into discerning how the brain works in the future. People like you will never accept any explanation other than "it's magic."
>>9289867
Let me help you out, you seem confused.
1) A valid example of when new science is called:
>Hmm, Maxwell's work with electromagnetism seems to make sense but contradicts the Newtonian assumption of absolute space and time.
2) An invalid example of when new science is called for:
>QUALIA ARE LITERALLY REAL PHYSICS TRANSCENDING PHENOMENA BECAUSE I BELIEVE REALLY HARD THAT THEY'RE REAL, LOLOLOL JUST OPEN YOUR EYES AND YOU CAN SEE THINGS, YOU CAN'T EXPLAIN THAT

>>9289883
And if you don't get it, our intelligence is the automaton part of us, even in forming these observations I am simply being moved to act to analyse a fact by chemical reactions causing electrical behaviour in the brain.

My awareness of all of this is supplementary. My awareness in this case is simply a fact a computer (My body) is analysing because it is compelled to.

>>9289859
Not him, but you can't truly observe your own behavior, that is if you are talking about it in the way of being able to change your behavior. You can document it in a journal but you will always lead a very deterministic life. This is proved by twin studies which show that you do most of the time end up in the same position in your life regardless of how much you choose to change yourself. You can really only observe your behavior after the fact, which is like viewing data, it isn't happening in real time. You aren't your interior you, you are only your senses, which isn't your interior life

>>9289891
>They do not require "Thought" as you understand it in the same way a clock doesn't.

>This doesn't require "qualia" as a literal thing that's appearing to you

See the above. You don't get it.

All of what you are describing is the automatic process of analysis. Intelligence is seperate to qualia altogether.

>Also calling that "dead" just shows you're having emotionally charged reactions to this topic.

Speak for yourself, I'm trying to juxtapose it to "alive" or "Aware" things with convenient vocabulary.

The point I'm trying to make to you is that machines don't "Believe" and that this a nonsense, machines don't have interior lives (though a machine/intelligence can react to, and analyse an interior life it is presented with) machines are just moving things goverened by natural laws.

>>9289883
no, you don't get it.
>>9289775
the senses feed us info and we process it then we react to it as automatons. the processing is electric signals in your brain. we "can feel" the electric and call it the self.

you really should look into mirror neurons and salience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron

i know that it's disappointing but it really is as it appears to be.

>>9289899
I'm not denying determinism.

The point I'm trying to make is that the idea of a moving thing "Believing" anything is a nonsense.

Machines simply move without being aware of their own movement at all.

>>9289905
>the senses feed us info and we process it then we react to it as automatons. the processing is electric signals in your brain. we "can feel" the electric and call it the self.

It's impossible with you.

What's that "feeling"? You don't seem to get that we don't need to be aware of that to calculate, to move, to function.

It's hard to explain but think of it like this, everything you do, including reacting to your own interior life is mechanical, but the existence of an interior life itself is "Observation" and that observation is qualia and it exists.

>>9289891

Look my boy, you don't ~know~ that qualia are merely beliefs, i.e. pure information in some wave-function. You simply have a framework of materialism that applies to purely physical phenomena and explains them very well, and your argument is that if a phenomena is not purely physical then it doesn't fit the framework so therefore it can't exist. Don't you see the fallacy there?

Whether or not something fits a framework is completely irrelevant to whether it is true. As a human, you are born into a world where you deal entirely with subjective experiences. These wild assortments of different correlated qualities (sounds, colors, emotions) seem to indicate the existence of something noumenal: a physical world. Yet, you have never directly experienced something physical. You ~believe~ that you are a human being with a brain that is embedded in a physical world, with your brain giving you a decently accurate representation of events, and that this physical world has a thing done by other humans called 'science' and that it explains things the best, and the science seems to handle things so well that you in fact believe that the very place you started from, your subjective experience, is in fact an illusion. Yet the physical world could just as well be the illusion.

>>9289907
Some machines are self aware idiot. Robots with proprioception are not high tech. Self awareness isn't the big question here, spatial and informational boundaries are.

>>9289920
Self awareness as you understand it is not self-awareness as I understand it.

>>9289913
self awareness don't actually exist. it is a mechanical thing. you need to prove that there's something emergent coming out of this mechanical processing.

la la la la
Lalalalala
lala laaaa

>>9289826
This completely

What we are experiencing exists in some way. Whether it directly maps to an external reality is irrelevant - the fact that this map, this felt presence of immediate experience, is experiencable, means it exists to some abstract degree

The argument that it does not exist is similar to the claim that a shadow does not exist because it does not perfectly represent the object casting it. Or that a black and white 240p video camera's inputted video feed does not exist because it's not a perfect representation of what it is filming

Malarchy, the felt presence of immediate reality exists as an aspect of the universe. All experiences exist just as much as an atom exists, even if they are mistaken experiences or sensory tricks. The experience exists, this is so axiomatically obvious

From this we can conclude that the psychedelic experience exists as well and this should broaden our horizons in the parameter space of experience. How large is the space? What are its parameters? What exists at the asymptotes?

Absolutely fascinating and completely relevant to science, yet it's labelled the same as nonsense like witchcraft and astrology

>>9289913
and you say "we don't need to be aware" as if the special processing to adapt to new information and react to them isn't useful in an universe with causality? there is a reason that basic robots cannot function outside of their controlled environment. they lack special processing for self awareness therefore unable to navigate in this university. as >>9289920
said.

go ahead and disconnect someone's nerves and see how rapidly the "subjective" reality changes for it. it's because the brain literally only can process reality as the inputs are fed into it.

>>9289920
Self-awareness as you understand it works something like this

Machines are merely moving objects governed by forces (Ultimately coming back to a prime mover but lets not waste our time) and the self-aware machine you're talking about is in fact a machine that moves, having been caused to move by itself in particular ways.

What I'm talking about is "observation"

>>9289936
You're misunderstanding the difference between "Reaction" and awareness.

You can be an extremely adaptive machine that moves effectively in response to a certain movement to solve a problem that movement poses by moving itself in various ways.

I know, it sounds stupid, but "awareness" isn't some beneficial thing either way, it's simply a fact.

It's very tempting to conflate "awareness" with intelligence or problem-solving of some stripe, but it's not. At best "awareness" is simply a fact processed by the intelligence.

>>9289945
What about a robot with a camera for eyes, sensors to detect the locations of its limbs, chemical detectors for a nose, microphones for ears, and a complex feedback loop based observation and learning system that allows it to keep track of current state while simultaneously reformatting the patterns and knowledge it has extracted from past state

Sound familiar? Yeah

Consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently self-referential computational systems.

>>9289956
>What about a robot with a camera for eyes, sensors to detect the locations of its limbs, chemical detectors for a nose, microphones for ears, and a complex feedback loop based observation and learning system that allows it to keep track of current state while simultaneously reformatting the patterns and knowledge it has extracted from past state

Sound familiar? Yeah

None of that necessarily implies it's actually "aware" of any of this. Just because it has cameras for eyes doesn't mean it actually "sees" anything as though it has an interior life.

It might well be as "aware" as a clock.

>>9289956
You could even go as far as to create a machine with fully fledged emotions.

But that doesn't necessarily imply it's actually "aware" in the same way we are.

>>9289956
For instance, just because a clock is loud and aggressive-sounding, that doesn't make it angry.

>>9289956
forget it, dualists are hopeless. physicalists will trumiph again in about 10 years.

>>9289965
Then I can say the same thing about you. What is the different? Do organic molecules impart special consciousness properties that silicon chips and copper wires do not impart? Please justify this claim

>>9289971
Why would you be aware but it wouldn't be? Explain what it lacks that you have

>>9289974
And just because you're typing these words right now doesn't mean you're actually sentient, you could be a p-zombie. Are you? We both know you aren't. Actually I don't know for sure. But you know.

>>9289979
>Then I can say the same thing about you. What is the different? Do organic molecules impart special consciousness properties that silicon chips and copper wires do not impart? Please justify this claim

Other than that I am self-aware? I don't know.

But just because something else IS going on doesn't mean I can necessarily explain it right now, the field is naescent.

Who are you ITT you I can be clear who I'm debating.

>you could be a p-zombie

This is actually the point I'm making, it's perfectly possible for us to be p-zombies, but we aren't.

>>9289990
So I can be clear

>>9289977
More like Dennett is a fraud.

>>9289317

I'm convinced the physical world consists of deterministic p-zombies, and that the higher power of the universe enters into these p-zombies if their informational complexity is sufficient to experience life as a humble physical being.

>>9289990
How do you know it's perfectly possible for us to be p-zombies? As far as I can tell they're only philosophical conjectures which we only know to exist in our language-based descriptions of them

What if it's the case that it's simply impossible for a p-zombie to exist without internal hardware that would naturally cause consciousness to emerge? This is completely possible.

>>9289955
awareness modifies and shapes the reaction. therefore, it was advantageous for organisms with special configurations of neurons that enables it to be aware and reacts in novel ways.

>>9289852
>You don't need proof to refrain from making a needless additional assumption about magic being real.
wtf did i just say? Its just as foolhardy to assume that there is no "magic being" as it is to assume that there is. Unless you can produce evidence that there is none or that there is, then any claim you make is an assumption and therefore not scientific, more an opinion then a fact.

>You don't need proof to agree with physics.
>the bill nye appeal to authority argument
please stfu faggot, if you make a claim, you need to validate it first. And if i am unwilling to accept a materialistic assumption about consciousness (or an ephiphenomenal one) that does not make me anti-science. If anything it is me applying scientific rigor to this problem.

You can hold the materialistic view (or whatever view you have) all you like, just don't conflate it with the objective or scientific understanding of the problem; because unless there is reproducible evidence that you are right, then it is NOT scientific by any stretch of the imagination.

>>9290013
Nothing supernatural exists anon, period, we know this for certain already

Want to know why? Because if it exists, IT IS NATURAL. It is real, it is a part of whatever existence consists of. We just don't have an explanation. There is nothing supernatural, everything that is something is natural. Supernatural properties only exist as a figment of our imagination by definition because if they ever ended up being real they would no longer be supernatural

Yet another Wittgensteinian trick of language misleading philosophers for millenia

>>9290007
>How do you know it's perfectly possible for us to be p-zombies

The point I'm making is that the automatons the rest of the people ITT are supposing are p-zombies.

I'm tired and lazy and abbreviated it to "perfectly possible"

But on the real? I don't think we'd live in the world we do if we were P-zombies, a lot of our philosophies are built around contemplating our ability to be aware of our functioning which simply wouldn't have emerged if there was no inner-functioning to contemplate.

>>9290003
P-zombies are impossible though.

>>9290008
Good point anon.

Assuming Qualia is real, it may well indeed be an evolutionary advantage.

But honestly I was trying to avoid talking about it because it's very complicated, better to try and resolve on whether or not it exists before we debate its advantages and disadvantages.

>>9290019
Notably, Socratic and Platonic philosophies emerged as a consequence of this line of thought.

It could be said, in a sense, the Western intellectual tradition relies on Qualia.

>>9290018
Pragmatically "Supernatural" just means "Existing outside of the predictions of the current model"

Human language is pragmatic, but since science relies on rigour it's probably not healthy to use such pragmatic language when dealing with science.

>>9290013
>that does not make me anti-science
Flatearthers are not anti-science either.

>>9290027

Maybe it works as a 'sand box' for neurons to communicate and synchronize. If you want all neurons experiencing 'red' to convey the same information up a hierarchy of layers even though they are spatially separated by some distance in a cortical layer, they should probably fire in the same kind of way and connect to the same parent neuron encoding the concept of 'redness'. So perhaps its some form of evolved means of synchronizing information between neurons which are spatially distant that either uses qualia directly, or creates qualia epiphenomenologically (e.g. maybe different neuronal firing rates produce some kind of physical phenomena we are not aware of yet).

>>9290043
Which anon am I talking to? Reference a previous post please.

>>9290018
>Nothing supernatural exists anon
>It is real, it is a part of whatever existence consists of
not denying this. However, there is still so little we know about the universe, for instance, until recently we though atoms were these definable quanta that exist as discrete particles with definable momentum, mass, and position. Now we know that shit's weird. electrons are waves and particles, nuclei are made of elementary quarks with no definable mass that jostle around to produce the imitation of mass (in fact mass itself is merely a reflection of motion causing disturbances in the higgs field), its bizarre. We also have theories about higher dimensions and such-forth.

My problem is your baseless assumptions. Don't make a claim and call it scientific if you don't have proof for it.
Until you can validate it with reproducible empirical evidence i don't want to her a peep out of you about how what you say it fact and anyone who disagrees with you is unscientific, FTFY.

>>9290045

>>9290003
>>9289917
>>9289826

>>9290027
i think that qualia is a processing artifact. not that it actually exists, but as a certain configuration of physical signals.

>>9290034
Supernatural means not obeying any order of operation.

>>9290058
I know that it exists.

I think it has implications for how we think in the same way that any fact we observe has implications for how we think, therefore our intellectual reaction to it will adjust our behaviour, therefore our behaviour isn't independent of qualia.

>>9290047
Agnosticism is just screeching, it's not relevant in scientific context.

>>9290037
that's a different beast. With flat-earth theory there is too much information in support of the round eath theory, and all the flat-earth explanations are weak. The most tangible evidence they have is "in my photographs it looks flat, so it must be flat".
My biggest contention with that theory was how they have to keep moving the goal-post in order to keep it running.

Here are some major problems:
- The coriolis effect oging in 2 diffferent direction on the same plane (that's not how the coriolis effect works)
- the norther and southern parts of the world having two different night-skies
- the south and north both having an equivalent travel time despite the fact that in the flat-disk model the southern half has a greater circumference than the norther half
- the "magic sky-dome" hypothesis having no proof besides 2 videos of a rocket exploding mid-air
- the fact that gravity has been simplified to a "downward force" rather than an attractive force between bodies of mass/matter (which was proved to be the case in Newtons experiment of the 2 lead weights in suspension)
- etc.

There is too much evidence against the flat-earth theory, and too much evidence for the globe-earth model.

Usually when this is pointed out they rely on conspiracy-theory level explanations as to why that evidence is not evidence: "the globe-earthers have been deceiving you, they want your money by buying their globe models". Its pretty retarded though, since it would require far more effort than it is worth to cover up something so easily observable.

>>9290078
>Agnosticism blah blah blah scientific context.
I never said agnosticism was the correct approach (though it is the academically honest one, since it is an admission of ones lack of knowing (though usually this should be followed up by seeking answers rather than just sitting there)).
What i said is one should not claim that their assumption is correct without proofs to back their claim up. You stated your assumption was a fact, now prove it. You can't? Then don't say that your opinion is a scientific fact!

>>9290013
>And if i am unwilling to accept a materialistic assumption about consciousness
Being unwilling because of butthurt is anti-science. Scientific understanding of the problem is a consequence of an attempt of scientific understanding of the problem, which is not the case with idealistic screeching which is too obviously backed by butthurt.

>>9289317
>mfw I see Dennett shills on /sci/

Non-reductionist physicalism is as ridiculous as it sounds. Moreover, these people tend to be adherents to scientism; they ascribe to science what is not scientific.

>>9289317
>mfw I see Dennett shills on /sci/

Non-reductionist physicalism is as ridiculous as it sounds. Moreover, these people tend to be adherents to scientism; they ascribe to science what is not scientific.

>>9290086
>I never said agnosticism was the correct approach
So it was a sophism?
>though it is the academically honest one
It isn't, because agnosticism doubts itself as well. And how is it honest to adhere to an incorrect approach at all?

>>9290142
Dennett is a fraud.

>>9290142
Sure physicalism sucks, but it's still light years ahead of retarded idealistic screeching.

>>9290079
Same for supernatural: all the science and history is evidence against supernatural with the same goal-post movement. For supernatural soul it's going to move further when quantum mind fails. Idealists are invested in copenhagen faggotry, and it has pretty formal problems.

>>9289317
Yes, you just have to accept that colors are inexplicable and get on with science. Atheists are frauds.

determinism bro

>>9289826
>strict materialist onanists
kek

>>9290144
>It isn't, because agnosticism doubts itself
You're thinking of skepticism, which doubts the very nature of gathering knowledge itself. Brain-in-jar nonsense comes from this school of epistemology.
Consider reading through my comment?

>>9290116
>>9290116
>ASSUMPTION
dammit, you're dense.
>Scientific understanding of the problem is a consequence of an attempt of scientific understanding
Which is what i want, but no: you need to validate your biases by saying that your opinions are scientific fact, instead of proving it.
To put it analagously: you said water is a fish, i said prove it. You responded by saying that its very anti-science to question whether water is a fish or not.

>>9290183
>all the science and history is evidence against supernatural with the same goal-post movement
It's not goal-post moving if the ones with different explanations are different people from different generations. If one generations believes in the 4-charisma model for physical health, and the next generation believes in the systems model (the modern one), then doctors are not moving he goal-post by changing what they consider to be the case. It's only really moving-the-goalpost if you constantly change the requirements through an argument so that your opponent can't win.
Certainly in human history there have been the obnoxious and idiotic christian literalists, but even church fathers going back as Ignatius and St. Peter thought literalists were full of crap (indeed, many early Christians thought that the 7-days in genesis were non-literal, representing aeons of time or periods of creation as opposed to 7 actual earth days). Christian theology is based on the concept of spiritual-physical dualism, which is what allowed Christianity to pave the foundations of the scientific world.

Now currently there are quite a few Christians who, holding this dualistic approach, beleive that consciousness is independant of the body, and bound to it, somehow. cont-->

>>9290376
cont-->
Hope that helps :^)

>>9289877
>There's no reason not to suppose that when the alternative is literally rejecting
No. A completely baseless leap into the immaterial or material beyond the material is required to even entertain the notion. This is anti-scientific. Anti-reality and anti-truth, really.

>I think therefore I am
No, this still holds. You think, therefor you exist to some extent. The specifics are something else entirely. You thinking means there is material interacting, so you exist, unlike what you believe phenomena doesn't just appear from nothing. Let alone explicitly for the mental mechanics of a specific species.

>>9290018
>Supernatural properties only exist as a figment of our imagination by definition because if they ever ended up being real they would no longer be supernatural
Not even that. They exist in our brains, as encoded information.

>>9290724
different anon here.
What if consciousness/soul begins as an epiphenomena of the brain, but then operates independent of it afterwards?

>>9289333
yes

>mfw the only thing keeping myself from killing myself is waiting for the day eliminative materialism becomes the mainstream view and btfos half of the intellectual establishment

>>9291262
Kek

>>9291262

How would you prove that? Closest you could get is prove that there is a one-to-one correspondence between subjective experiences and information encoded through physical means, and that all our behavior was directly attributable simply to this 100% physical process in the brain. However that would still not disprove qualia as epiphenomena. It would simply be outside the realm of scientific inquiry, at least until some radical breakthrough happened.

>>9291275
who said anything about 'proof'?

>>9289317
>realized there is no consciousness
>realized
>no consciousness
there is no point in this thread existing then

>>9291276

Materialism is already the mainstream view of scientists. Qualia was so tied to Christian views of the soul that nearly every ' atheist skeptic' and machine learning enthusiast is a strict materialist. Hence we have organizations such as the one dedicated for the ethical treatment of reinforcement learning agents. Its going to be the fault of strict materialists when sex bots become outlawed and the left can euthanize wrong-thinkers (after all the latter are just automata with faulty software, right?).

>>9291283
Just a problem derived from using a language that was developed for thousands of years with assumption of existence of consciousness.

>>9291287
Politics is not science. Even if consequences are undesirable, the truth remains the truth.

>>9290724
>A completley baseless leap

One that's required when the alternative is literally ontologically impossible and supposes that we are all P-zombies.

Between a non-starter and supposing a new theory altogether I'm with the latter because forget being anti-science, what you're suggesting is straight up anti deductive logic altogether.

>No, this still holds. You think, therefor you exist to some extent.

No, you don't get it at all. In the world you are suggesting you would not have an interior world whatsoever. It's not a question of a "different kind" of interior world, there would simply be no such thing.

>>9290724
>unlike what you believe phenomena doesn't just appear from nothing

Also this is autistic, of course creatio ex nihilio is possible.

Supposing that before the universe there existed a nothingness with no physical laws, there is no reason to suppose such a nothingness wouldn't create the universe, there would be nothing stopping it from doing so.

The above has to be true or you get absurd infinite regresses.

> input goes in > signal goes through a bunch of processors > consciousness comes out

Duh, ezpz

>>9291402
the philosophical nonsense you stem turds dribble out is fascinating,

>>9291398
p zombie is incoherent.

>>9291432
Why so?

>>9291432
Bear in mind I'm not using the traditional kind of a Philosophical zombie, the idea of a being that's entirely behaviorally identical.

My belief is that if we had qualia, whatever its physical makeup, our being able to observe and analyse it would, by definition change our behaviour. If I was being less lazy what I actually mean is "automaton", something that doesn't have an interior world and simply "does" in the same way a clock simply moves.

I don't think there's any way to prove you would ever know the difference between if you were a p-zombie or a non-zombie.
And because you can't establish that you'd ever know the difference, the p-zombie scenario seems like the better explanation since it doesn't invoke any of that dualist non-physical magic business.
I would only be convinced we're not just p-zombies obsessing over a non-existent "hard problem" if someone could provide an actual way for someone to know they weren't a p-zombie. All I've ever seen from people claiming they know they aren't is some variation of shouting "I know I'm not because I just know!" repeatedly, sometimes mixed in with insults about how you're stupid if you don't unconditionally accept this as true.
Given a choice between doubting my own ability to know I'm actually "experiencing" anything vs. believing there's some future scientific breakthrough that will prove and explain the existence of non-physical "experiences," I see the former as way more likely than the latter.

>>9291674
First post or are you a previous poster?

Slow traffic makes it hard to tell.

>>9289317
>not the animated one

>>9291674
You cannot have something that acts conscious, but isn't actually conscious. The idea of a p-zombie is retarded.

>>9291835
That's not true, supposing I created a sufficiently intelligent robot it would converse with you as I do right now and yet have no interior life at all, like a sufficiently advanced chatbot.

Spare maybe the fact that to it the concept of an "interior life" is nonsensical, being as that's not something it has.

>>9291851

>a sufficiently intelligent robot it would converse with you as I do right now and yet have no interior life at all

How would that be possible? If a finite state function is advanced enough to convince us it's conscious, it's no different than a human. You can't even prove humans have "interior lives" so whatever definition of "interior life" is is completely meaningless

>>9291938
>If a finite state function is advanced enough to convince us it's conscious, it's no different than a human

If a child is good enough at rhetoric to convince you that leprechauns ran away with the cookies, it's no different to leprehchauns actually having ran away with the cookies, you can't prove they didn't run away with the cookies, so whatever definition you have of the kid being a "liar" is completely meaningless.

>>9291835
>You cannot have something that acts conscious, but isn't actually conscious.
I personally don't think there's any meaning to "consciousness" beyond the behavior (and the physiology supporting it) in the first place, but since others do think there's some extra non-physical "consciousness" thing then to describe what I think we're like I need to do what I did, which is to introduce a version of us with that extra non-physical thing and a version of us without that extra non-physical thing so these people who believe in the non-physical thing know exactly what sort of stance I'm taking here.

>>9289905
>Mirror neurons
>Existing
We need a lot more research in neuro to confirm one way or the other.

>>9291949
But you can have behaviour and physiology without any kind of "Self"

Not the same behaviour of course, we wouldn't be having this conversation, IMO, without a self to consider but what you're effectively denying is that you exist, you're not denying the object of "you", i.e. the flesh and blood anon, but you're denying the existence of your interior self because what you don't seem to realize that "Behaviour" doesn't require consciousness and to conflate the two is absurd.

Certain behaviourS (such as this conversation) require consciousness, but consciousness is not a behaviour.

>>9291946
This.

Consciousness is nothing more than complex bio circuitry.
It started with constriction.
Constriction became responsive attraction, repulsion and reflex.
Mix this with the storing and recall, and you have basic consciousness.

The problem with AI is that we don't allow it to mature from the ground up.

The problem with the rest of you is that you reject materialism because you secretly want to believe you can escape death.

Stop it.

Grow up.

Brains are simple.

>>9292003

Do you know how I know that you are under 18?

>>9292003
>Brains are simple.

Speak for your own.

>>9291949
In practice actually your refusal to accept the self, precludes the existence of

>the object of "you", i.e. the flesh and blood anon

Because the mechanical "you" that exists has interacted with the "Conscious Self" modifying its behaviour.

>>9292003
>"love is just a bunch of chemical reactions in the brain"
>states shit about AI, has never touched it in their life
>"You only believe in consciousness because you are an unenlightened theist" *tips fedora euphoircally*
>Claims that the most complex organ in the entire field of biology, which people are still struggling to grasp, is simple

>>9291974
>Certain behaviourS (such as this conversation) require consciousness, but consciousness is not a behavior.
I think we're starting to get a little muddled in meaning here, so let me be clear: You and many other don't *believe* "consciousness" is behavioral. I know that, everyone knows that. It's not a mistake on my part to call it behavioral. I'm not confusing it with behavior. I'm making a deliberate argument that it is behavioral and that the way you and others think of it as a non-physical thing in itself that exists in addition to behavior is not the way things are in reality.
Take the example of "seeing the color blue" for example. What you probably believe happens is a non-physical "blueness" thing appears before you and this is a real thing that science has not yet explained.
I don't believe that. What I believe actually happens is we have all sorts of little behavioral and physiological tendencies (including feedback loop type self-reports i.e. "thoughts") that get associated with times when we're in the presence of wavelengths of light that count as "blue." There are adaptive benefits to acting as though this whole process is just one simple unified thing we're "experiencing," so we do in fact act as though it is.
>But you can have behaviour and physiology without any kind of "Self"
That isn't an argument against "consciousness" being behavior (and the physiology supporting it). You can have rectangles without them being squares, that doesn't mean squares aren't rectangles. There's behavior that isn't part of what gets lumped together and abstracted as the concept of "consciousness," that doesn't mean the behavior that *does* get lumped together and abstracted as the concept of "consciousness" doesn't exist.
Also don't know why you're bringing up "self" since that's an entirely different issue. "Self" is more like an ongoing narrative device for convenience of reference rather than an actual thing that exists.

>>9292036

This is the best materialist post in this thread.

t. dualist

>>9292018
Appeal to ridicule is a logical fallacy.
Only idiots use logical fallacies.
Kill yourself.

>>9292026
No.
"Self" isn't required for any of what you think it's required for. It's a label for grouping together different pieces of information after the fact, it doesn't actually orchestrate anything on its own. It's basically the main character in rationalization stories.
Thoughts for example? Your "self" isn't creating them. Your "self" is used after the fact in stories about how it created those thoughts, but the thoughts really just emerge on their own. They're information generated by a physical brain, not the product of any "self" entity.

>>9292029
Love is just a bunch of reactions.
The brain is simple.
What is hard is trying to force for an old belief system of a non material soul which is nonsense into a rational material model.

We already have working Brain models.
We've understood Brain structures for some time.

You're way behind.

>>9292036
> I'm not confusing it with behavior. I'm making a deliberate argument that it is behavioral

You've just managed to argue that rather than simple confusion, this is a deliberate rationalization on your part.

As for the rest of your spiel, you're still essentially arguing that "you" don't exist. Arguing that experiences are assimilated piecewise is not arguing against them being actually experienced.

>>9292050
You're arguing as though what I just said was.

"The self causes thoughts in itself"

As though I'm arguing against determinism, which is not what I'm arguing.

>>9292071
>essentially arguing that "you" don't exist
Yes, that's right. It doesn't really exist, at least not at all in the way you think it does. It's a rationalization label, not an actual mechanism responsible for doing anything.
This isn't the first time someone's argued that point, it's old hat Buddhist philosophy if you want to read more about the general idea.

>>9292086
You're arguing something patently absurd.

If you notice not once have I disagreed with you on HOW we experience phenomena, I agree that we have complicated inner mechanisms to put together information that constitutes an experience.

But that doesn't mean we don't ultimately experience it, regardless of method.

>>9292053
whatever you say fedora

>>9292086
I mean, even in a rationalization story, the thing that you are positing you and I am, would not "Experience" the rationalization story in the sense of an inner world, he would simply externally behave that way and speak as though he had.

The problem is that I am not merely behaving as though I have an inner world, I actually have one. Can I prove to you I have one? No, not rigoruously, my ability to consider the concept of one might indicate that I do being as I have reacted to the apparent existance of one at all.

>>9292096
>You're arguing something patently absurd.
Not an argument.
>that doesn't mean we don't ultimately experience it
I never argued the existence of behavior means "experience" isn't a real thing (I don't think it's a real thing, but that's not my argument for why it's not a real thing).
I argued that because you wouldn't ever be able to tell the difference between if you were a p-zombie or not then this means the non-zombie explanation has no advantages to it over the p-zombie one, and the p-zombie explanation is the one I would go with since it doesn't require that we believe in some extra-physical magic ghost thing that visits us when our sensory organs receive input but mysteriously doesn't have any sort of footprint at all left on the physical world i.e. no physics calculation will ever be altered in even the slightest bit by the presence or absence of "qualia," meaning the world behaves exactly the same whether or not this alleged "experience" thing exists or not, and if the world is behaving exactly the same with or without an alleged phenomenon in the picture, then it's probably a good idea just to drop that alleged phenomenon as something that probably doesn't exist.

>>9292086
But the thing about that is that even then I'm supposing too far, I doubt an automaton would even be able to behave as though he had an experience because that is not a fact inputted into his system that he can conduct the behaviour of analysing on.

It's only because we have conscious experiences at all that we can exhibit the behaviour of reporting on them.

>>9292114
>I argued that because you wouldn't ever be able to tell the difference between if you were a p-zombie

But I can, merely because I have an inner world at all.

If I was a P-zombie, I wouldn't.

In either case it's simply that I can't prove to you that I have this experience.

It's hard to explain to you because your argument is so full of fucked up assumptions from the ground up.

>>9292110
>my ability to consider the concept of one might indicate that I do being as I have reacted to the apparent existance of one at all
It definitely doesn't indicate that, and I'll give you an example for why that is:
Numbers do not exist in the way rocks or water do. You are not going to run into the number 4 floating next to your pet cat just because we use the abstract concept of "4" to describe the thing your cat's legs have in common with the wheels of a car.
We are 100% capable of behaving in terms of abstract objects that don't really exist in the way physical objects do. The fact a person reacts to the concept of their own "self" as though it were a real thing doesn't make that concept an actual, real thing. It just means it's doing what it's invoked to do, which is serve as a reference point for personal narrative purposes.

>>9292114
I mean, how you can absurdly think that your argument doesn't contradict cogito ergo sum is bizarre.

Cogito Ergo Sum isn't about exhibiting the behaviour, in an exterior world, of having articulated throughts. It's about being because we observe those thoughts in our inner world and having that inner world constitutes "being"

You're effectively reducing a human to behaviour denying altogether the existence of an inner world although you have one. Essentially suggesting "you" don't exist and that you're an automaton, merely an exterior behaviour. bizarrely

>>9292115
>I doubt an automaton would even be able to behave as though he had an experience because that is not a fact inputted into his system that he can conduct the behaviour of analysing on
You can very easily describe an artificial body that behaves as though it has "qualia" visiting it even though it's really only operating in terms of ordinary information processing. "Facts" aren't "qualia." You can give it every fact in the world, that still won't mean it now has any literal "qualia" phenomena.
It's actually much more difficult to describe an artificial body that actually does have "qualia" because even if you believe literal "qualia" exist you're still left in a position of having absolutely no idea what it is or how it works except for your conviction that it's something other than the physical and is something you're very certain is real.

>>9292124
>cogito ergo sum
Cartesian dualism is considered an insult in modern times. Nobody takes that shit seriously anymore, it hasn't been taken seriously in a very long time. I don't know why people still bring up Descartes thinking he's the authority on how "consciousness" works when his views are really the main thing most opposing parties on this issue agree is wrong.

>>9292120
That's just a straight up category error. 4 is an abstract object, consciousness is something that must exist in order to observe that such a thing exists, instead of merely doing things with the number four as a computer might do.

>>9292131
Just ad hominem.

You're straight up denying your own existence.

>>9292134
>consciousness is something that must exist in order to observe that such a thing exists
That's the thing we're disputing, you can't use it as a reason for itself. You need a reason for why that should be seen as the case other than just asserting that's the case.

>>9292138
>You need a reason for why that should be seen as the case other than just asserting that's the case.

You're jumping the gun.

If I told you to look up in the sky and look at the stars you wouldn't respond to me suggesting "You need to make an argument as to why the stars should be rather than asserting your observation"

Analysing why something is and should be the way it is starts with observation of the phenomena and pragmatism is not a good argument against developing a nascent field when it's ontologically possible that it explains our minds and world.

I'm excited about scientists figuring out how to program genuine human emotion and behaviour, maybe they could apply it to me, too.

>>9292136
>You're straight up denying your own existence.
The stance is organisms exist, while "you" and "I" aren't literal existing objects on top of these organisms, they're labels of convenience. So it's not really a case of someone denying (or not denying) their own existence since you're assuming a "self" thing that "owns" an existence in the first place which isn't really the case.

>>9292147
> they're labels of convenience.

They're not, my observation of the world or my "Self" is a fact.

>you're assuming

Wrong, I'm observing. Qualia is my explanation for this observation.

The observation that I am making observations, rather than simply behaving.

>>9292142
>you wouldn't respond to me suggesting "You need to make an argument as to why the stars should be rather than asserting your observation"
That's actually a valid complaint though if you're trying to establish the existence of something that's in doubt. You wouldn't be able to just write a paper saying "I saw it so it exists." It seems reasonable enough to just accept that stars exist, but that's only because A) they have the benefit of heterophenomenology (verifiable by more than just one party) and B) lots of formal work has already been done to account for their existence with more than just observation alone and C) lots of impact on the rest of the world can be identified secondary to these stars existing.
A, B, and C don't apply for the topic of "qualia" in contrast. Only one party can ever observe an instance of "qualia" allegedly happening e.g. no one can show someone else their claimed "experience" of the color blue, no formal work has been done to account for "qualia" as a real world phenomenon which leads into the last point it fails on which is that the reason no work has been done in a formal way to pin down what real content this "qualia" thing has if any is that you would pretty quickly realize you couldn't identify any sort of interaction between it and the physical world that would change in even the slightest way how ordinary physics works. There is no new theory of physics that changes what existing physics predicts about the interactions of real world objects by accounting for the role of "qualia" interacting with these real world objects. This all effectively points to this "qualia" thing not actually existing.

>>9292151
A camera observes. Do cameras have "qualia" too?

Evidence for materialism: Anton-Babinski syndrome shows that patients can have 'false beliefs', but whether they actually subjectively experience the things they claim is unclear.

Evidence against materialism: Blindsight is caused by damage to the V1 area of the visual cortex, with most activity in higher visual cortex regions remaining partly in tact. If consciousness was a self-serving illusion, one would expect the illusion to be encoded by higher cortical regions, which are more interconnected to languages areas and would generally be expected to encode more abstract concepts. This is further bolstered by evidence from patients who are missing half their visual field due to partial damage to their V1 area. I.e. subjective visual experience is directly proportional to the low-level processing of visual information early on in the visual cortex.

>>9292163
>That's actually a valid complaint though if you're trying to establish the existence of something that's in doubt. You wouldn't be able to just write a paper saying "I saw it so it exists."

That's not what I'm suggesting we do at all, what I'm suggesting is that it's a perfectly valid observation and if true explains our minds and is therefore worth developing.

>A) they have the benefit of heterophenomenology (verifiable by more than just one party) and B) lots of formal work has already been done to account for their existence with more than just observation alone and C) lots of impact on the rest of the world can be identified secondary to these stars existing.

These three things have only been achieved because people have made the justifiable assumption that their observations are valid and then subsequently worked dilligently to prove the validity of such observations.

Your denial of the validity of an observation in favour of an ontologically impossible rationalization that we merely "Do" rather than "Are" because of the pragmatic reason that it would require introducing another field rather than leaving science as it is, is as absurd as rejecting relativity because of the pragmatic reason that classical physics explains most of the phenomena it sets out to explain as well as it needs to.

> Only one party can ever observe an instance of "qualia" allegedly happening

THEIR Qualia happening, but multiple sources can easily attest that they have seen the colour blue, and when asked to identify which in a series of swatches of colours is blue, do so with the benefit of that experience (Excepting of course the colour blind)

>couldn't identify any sort of interaction between it and the physical world

Not necessarily true, I don't know that it would change how physics works, or that it would need to, but it could be an explanation for self-reflective behaviours like the ones we're displaying right now.

>>9292164
A camera does not observe.

A camera "does" in the same way that clockwork "does", it has no interior life.

To record an image, and to "Observe" said image are two different things.

>>9292177
We definitely have heterophenomology with the evidence of *reports* of "seeing the color blue." What we don't have is heterophenomenology of a literally existing "blue qualia" thing. Those reports might just be reports or those reports might be pointed at some undiscovered non-physical magic thing that really does exist, but we don't need to even pick either of those two possibilities to recognize the question isn't something covered by heterophenomology.
>I don't know that it would change how physics works
If some undiscovered super-physical phenomenon really existed, wouldn't it be a little weird if physics stayed exactly the same and nothing about this special phenomenon had even the slightest bit of impact on the physical world? I think we need to seriously think about the incredibly vast scope of phenomena that physics accurately models, from scales much, much smaller and much, much larger than anything a human being could ever successfully look at or figure out on his own through mundane common sense approaches. Physics is so successful at covering all that scope exactly because it isn't tied up in our limited human scale intuitions about the world and instead is a pure description of the fundamental principles that objects in our world behave according to. So it should set off all sorts of bullshit alarms when an idea of some special other sort of phenomenon is suggested that mysteriously has no footprint on any of the vast amounts of scope covered by physics as a tool for modeling and predicting the world around us. Chances are very good the explanation in that sort of situation is that the problem lies with our intuitions and not with the physics.

>>9292222
> Those reports might just be reports or those reports might be pointed at some undiscovered non-physical magic

Your calling it magic is both dismissive and speaks to your own skin in the game on this subject.

If it exists, and it does exist though I am currently not in a position to prove it to you in the same way I'm not in a position to prove the existence of black holes, but am almost entirely certain of their existence, it is a real, natural phenomena.

> and nothing about this special phenomenon had even the slightest bit of impact on the physical world?

That's not what I'm saying, it may well have impact on the physical world.

What I'm suggesting is that I don't know if such impacts would require altering any currently existing rules, possibly adding new ones. I don't know and I'm not familiar enough to comment.

>mfw someone thinks there isn't a hard problem

These answers. Requires hard truth validness. It's an evolutionary roller-coaster. I think the answer lies deep within our dna. Deep within the nucleus. Question and answers are like having a old classical masterpiece of mozart that being used edited and bendt with to create a remix. And the did it become better or worse? Searching for the absolute truth could not more directly go all haywire. Everlastingly absence but wilded away the true happening. Funny that people are still stuck with this. Sometimes i think like i did as a child when you stumble upon these fingery formalities. That it just is what it is and be happy or fine with it. Still funny being brighter than the other kids though.

>>9293045
Can't tell if this is meant to mock or to explain...

>>9292180

Brainlet here.

Say the camera records the image, then compares and sorts it with its other images in memory. It does this by following a set of rules, but so do you when you look at something? If the sorting system in the camera is advanced enough i fail to see the difference..

>>9293674
>i fail to see the difference

And this is the reason that you, rather than I, are the brainlet.

By way of very crude analogy, the lights can be on, people look like they're dancing, but nothing's really going on inside. If you've seen Home Alone you'll get my point.

None of what you've described explains the existence of an interior life, everything you've described is automatic and can be done automatically.

>>9293674
Sorry, you're describing yourself as a Brainlet.

I was being rude, excuse me.

>>9293674
>then compares and sorts it with its other images in memory. It does this by following a set of rules

It does this all without being aware it's doing it, merely following a set of rules, or programmed instructions.

The difference between this and us is that we're aware we're doing all of that.

consciousness is a faculty of the soul not the brain. Nothing you do to the brain effects consciousness itself, only the objects consciousness experiences.
So if you get drunk or dream or hallucinate or in deep sleep or see the sun shining brightly you are always conscious, the only difference is what appears on the screen of your vision.
The subject is not the objects it perceives.
Big difference.
Another faculty of the soul is free-will.
Reason and intuition belong to the soul as well but once it is embodied it's forced to abide by the rules of physics and biology. The limitations of its genes and race and gender. etc

>>9293722
explain why a knock to the head can cause loss of consciousness

>>9293722
I've been ITT defending the hard problem, but to introduce myticism and "the soul" defeats the point of seriously trying to explain the phenomenon.

To get everybody on the same page, the problem we are all trying to confront is explaining the existence of the interior life. We all basically acknowledge it exists, it becomes a question of how it works, whether it's a function of our behaviour or a function of an as-yet poorly understood additional phenomena called Qualia.

>>9293728
>explain why a knock to the head can cause loss of consciousness
knock on the head cause the objects of your perception to change, to blurr, to loose focus, it might put you to sleep, it might mess your memory, but not consciousness itself.
consciousness is never lost, unless God destroys your soul for some reason

>>9293740
>i can't quantify the soul so is too mystical and I don't like it!!!
you can't quantify and put numbers on "consciousness". because they aren't material phenomena, they are the witnesses of material phenomena
big diff

>>9293744
There's no reason to assume additional to the existence of Qualia that Qualia constitutes a soul, implies a God, or even implies "Life eternal" or any of those claims.

>>9293741
Utterly laughable, in addition to not even answering the question. Pathetic.

>>9292237
We already know even if "qualia" existed that they have zero impact on the physical world. Neuronal firing happens as you'd expect it to happen based on classical physics. If "qualia" existed and had any sort of interaction with the physical world we'd be able to measure that difference between what you'd expect from the physical objects alone vs. what "qualia" is contributing. And there is not a single legitimate example anywhere of any real world objects ever having been influenced to behave differently than what their physical properties alone would have predicted due to "qualia" adding another factor to the equation.
This is the best evidence anyone will ever be able to come up with to say a given alleged something probably doesn't exist.

>>9293752
>If "qualia" existed and had any sort of interaction with the physical world we'd be able to measure that difference between what you'd expect from the physical objects alone vs. what "qualia" is contributing

Qualia may contribute to the ability to analyse Qualia, if we were automatons/p-zombies it's entirely possible the concept would be a nonsense to us because it wouldn't be a fact within our world.

>>9293747

There's no reason to assume that your faculties of reasoning work or that the world is predictable by logic or empiricism unless you accept the existence of a higher order in the universe which guarantees such consistency. Otherwise everything could just be a massive random coincidence (i.e. laws of physics just appear to hold), you could be a brain in a vat, etc. Hence by the time we are discussing the nature of consciousness, any coherent epistemology would implicitly already assume some kind of 'benevolent' or 'logical' structure to the universe. The existence of qualia strongly hints towards something which transcends the rest of physical reality qualitatively. If qualia are invoked by electrical processes of the brain, then that implies that similar processes occurring elsewhere or in the future/past will cause similar subjective experiences. I.e. panpsychism and that consciousness has and will always exist as long as what ever laws of the universe create it exist.

>>9293747
"qualia" like "emergent" is just another way to say "I have no idea how this scientifically happens or how to even define it"

>>9293751
denying your soul is less than laughable, it's sad and a sign of illness

>>9293626
It's meant to mock. Anti-Dennett anons believe the "hard problem" is real and will some day be resolved through some advancement in science that explains how "qualia" work, while Dennett argues that there isn't a "hard problem" in the first place and that we only behave as though "qualia" were real phenomena when really it's just our behavior around abstract non-real reference points for sensory input that create the impression of something extra to the physical. Anti-Dennett anons see this as ignoring "the problem" so the cartoon depicts Dennett pretending like that representation of "the problem" doesn't exist and walking around it.

>>9293760
OK, but again, if every part of the brain ever examined still works the same exact way it would be predicted to work on physical principles alone, then that means there isn't anything extra there contributing to how cognition works.

>>9293781
>if every part of the brain ever examined still works the same exact way it would be predicted to work on physical principles alone

It might function as predicted, but it is not enough to predict how it will function, you also have to go on to explain that functioning. It's ontologically important to know what is actually happening.

>>9293781
Because though it functions as predicted, those predictions don't fully explain elements of its functioning like self-awareness.

>>9293760
>it's entirely possible the concept would be a nonsense to us
Isn't it already? There's no definitive measurement of qualia beyond the immediately obvious categorization of stimuli, and the only thing that we really have a hard time explaining is the complexity of our response to it.
>>9293774
From a purely cause and effect analysis, there's probably a middleground in there. That humans can have complicated responses to the same stimuli - some of it recursive/chaotic is the effect of a biological system. Because our biological system is a mathematically chaotic system unto itself that is only the result of an unpredictable evolutionary chain that does not share human values (It'd be great if we had 2 hearts so I can eat triple cheese burgers every meal and never have to worry about heart attacks, but we only get one without organ harvesting), it's natural that our appreciation of qualia itself is the largely coincidental effect of evolution and an advantage over our natural adversaries rather than a phenomena that has a direct relationship with the laws of physics itself. As a matter of fact, phenomena such as phantom pain suggests that qualia such as motion is more often the brain exercising its predictive capacities (something that DEFINITELY with the whole "staying alive in a field with lots of snakes" thing) rather than some kinda voodoo magic that needs a revolution in the field of physics.

>>9293795
>Isn't it already?

No, it would simply be something we wouldn't be able to observe. We wouldn't be able to observe anything.

It would be a total nonsense in the sense that we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

>>9293781
It might be better to say that such a model would be able to easily predict correlates of qualia and explain them, but not qualia itself.

A theory explaining Qualia in addition is needed.

>>9293799
Right, however the capacity to categorize stimuli itself is required for different responses to different stimuli. What's so difficult to comprehend about the possibility of this categorization capacity being advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint, and that in an advanced enough capacity it would be able to recursively generate stimuli and responses unto itself, resulting in a mathematically chaotic system that can be selected for our current form of consciousness through natural selection?
None of this is unexplainable. Yes, you could argue that mathematical chaos functions as a fudge variable in this explanation, but it's a fudge variable that:
A - can exist
B - does not require new physical explanations
Lastly, even if we were p-zombies/automatons, we'd still be perfectly able to argue over qualia simply from our ability to categorize different stimuli. It's the classical chinese room problem - in fact, with multiple AI projects running across the globe, researchers might soon have to figure out how to get AIs to act entirely retarded as soon as qualia is mentioned so as to make sure philosophers don't look very, VERY silly.

>>9289317
>ITT: Conscious observers using their observations to argue that they do not exist

>>9293823
>and that in an advanced enough capacity it would be able to recursively generate stimuli and responses unto itself

I recognize that it's potentially advantageous, but what you are describing isn't an interior life, literally everything you're describing is possible without one. The human mind could just as easily function like clockwork and do what you're describing.

>A - can exist
>B - does not require new physical explanations

But C, is, despite what you have convinced yourself, not an interior life but merely a very complicated self-referencing clockwork computer.

Your charge in disputing my assertion of the existence of Qualia isn't to construct a sophisticated self-referential computer, it's to go on to explain how such a computer consitutes an interior life, which you have not done to anyone's satisfaction but your own, and I dispute that standard.

>Lastly, even if we were p-zombies/automatons, we'd still be perfectly able to argue over qualia simply from our ability to categorize different stimuli

No, we wouldn't. We might argue about categorization of phenomena, but the idea of having an interior awareness of those colours would not be something that was coherent to us, we would talk about these categories as external objects without any reference to an interior, something which would not make any sense to us. At least I suspect.

>>9293823
I'm using clockwork as the exemplar of the fact that the machine merely "Does" without being aware of the doing.

To be clear.

>>9293823
On categorization, we would be able to recognize that blue was not red was not yellow and so on, and point to each one on swatches.

But we wouldn't have an interior awareness of them, the concept of an interior awareness would be incoherent, they would merely be different objects to us that we recognized as such.

The ability categorize objects in itself doesn't explain the interior life that we DO have and you DO need to explain.

>>9293829
You're the brainlet one.

It seems like interior life argument boils down to the word "awareness". For hard problem defenders, awareness implies that there must be something observing to have awareness. While, physicalists think that awareness is an illusion.

Is it possible to develop some kind of experiment to find exactly what awareness is?

>>9293823

If qualia = false belief that works as a place marker, then why are patients with cortical blindsight able to talk about and interact with things which they can't subjectively experience in their mind's eye? Why does cortical blindness occur in the early low-level processing areas of the visual cortex and not in more abstract layers which are connected to language areas/the frontal lobe etc? If its a false belief, how can people miss only half their field of vision from partial cortical damage?

"Helen was a macaque monkey that had been decorticated; specifically, her primary visual cortex (V1) was completely removed. This procedure had the expected results that Helen became blind as indicated by the typical test results for blindness. Nevertheless, under certain specific situations, Helen exhibited sighted behavior. Her pupils would dilate and she would blink at stimuli that threatened her eyes. Furthermore, under certain experimental conditions, she could detect a variety of visual stimuli, such as the presence and location of objects, as well as shape, pattern, orientation, motion, and color.[4][5][6] In many cases she was able to navigate her environment and interact with objects as if she were sighted.[7]"

Similarly 29% of people with cerebral achromatopsia (cerebral subjective color blindness) can pass an Ishihara color recognition test.

I'm not saying this is incontrovertible evidence of qualia, but it definitely shows that its a possibility in terms of neuroscience, since there is a clear distinction between subjective experience and no subjective experience, it occurs in a very low-level area of the cortex (which makes sense, since then the entire visual field can be invoked by sets of neurons), and it seems partially independent of processing of beliefs and actions regarding purely informational content of a visual stimulus (which seems to be done by the LGN, etc).

>>9293830
>No, we wouldn't. We might argue about categorization of phenomena, but the idea of having an interior awareness of those colours would not be something that was coherent to us, we would talk about these categories as external objects without any reference to an interior, something which would not make any sense to us. At least I suspect.
Abstraction is something that humans were selected for. For example, we can talk about infinitismals in mathematics, but infinitismals for all intents and purposes don't really exist in real life for practical purposes(although we're trying damn hard to find it). Abstraction itself allows us to predict and plan. We would damn well be able to do argue about abstract things as automatons, just as computers are perfectly capable of spitting out integral calculations on their own.
>>9293835
Awareness itself IS the result, that's the entire point. Our whole "consciousness" schtick presents evolutionary advantages over being automatons, in that it's very slow when you try to teach things to the subconscious/purely reflexive automatons. Very slow, but you can eventually teach/naturally select them to reach a level where pattern recognition reaches a level where it inevitably arrives at the phenomena of consciousness. You can consider it a singularity event where the hardware evolves to the point where it's capable of generating its own software, and the software that resulted in consciousness beats out the software that simply takes A and spits out B.

>>9293903
>Abstraction is something that humans were selected for.

That's not adequate explanation of why a mechanical mind can constitute an interior world.

>We would damn well be able to do argue about abstract things as automatons

Without being aware of it.

Do you even realize that you're not explaining yourself? You're merely asserting that awareness is the result without adequately explaining the interior world as a product of mechanical things.

And you won't be able to, it's an impossible task.

>>9293872
>hey greg look at this blind monkey that can see shit
>huh. how do you know it's blind jeff?
>I cut the nerves out of the eyeball greg
jeff, blindfold the fucking monkey.

>>9293903
And being able to talk about something abstract such as an infintesimal or a colour is simply a byproduct of our previously mentioned ability to categorize, something which is markedly not talking about our interior world.

When we have this conversation we're not merely talking about our ability to categorize, or the categories themselves, we're talking about the interior world that allows us to do so and be aware of it. Something that a machine would not be able to do because such a concept is totally incoherent to them.

Being able to talk about categories of things /= being able to talk about the interior world which allows us to experience our own categorizations.

>>9293919

>>9293918
>Do you even realize that you're not explaining yourself? You're merely asserting that awareness is the result without adequately explaining the interior world as a product of mechanical things.
No, but I did demonstrate that natural phenomena/"mechanical things" (as mechanical as DNA is I guess) can result in an "interior world", through natural selection. I went so far as to explain that awareness itelf could very well be a severely complicated series of self-feeding stimuli, how such a chain would present natural advantages in being very flexible outside of biological limitations of the cells that constitute said system and thus allow rapid adaptation beyond simple natual selection and basically allow a "natural selection of abstract ideas".
The onus is now on you in explaining why the interior world that occupies humans is not the result of this "mechanical" natural selection.

>>9293944
>No, but I did demonstrate that natural phenomena/"mechanical things" (as mechanical as DNA is I guess) can result in an "interior world"

No you didn't, not even remotely. A self-referential, memory noting and predictive modelling computer is still an automaton, what you have described is not an interior world but a series of things an automaton could do perfectly well.

> I went so far as to explain that awareness itelf could very well be a severely complicated series of self-feeding stimuli

No you didn't, you have failed to demonstrate to anybody's satisfaction but your own how what you have described constitutes awareness and not a sophisticated automaton without an inner world.

>>9293944
For the record, I think consciousness IS beneficial in the process of natural selection, but doesn't emerge as a result of it at all.

>>9293944
>The onus is now on you in explaining why the interior world that occupies humans is not the result of this "mechanical" natural selection.

And my explanation, is that the things you try to invoke to explain that my prediction of the existence of Qualia is wrong, have been so far inadequate in explaining the existence of an interior world and that Qualia, with all of its pragmatic problems DOES allow for an inner world, it doesn't fully explain it because the field is nascent and that requires development.

But rather than follow your path and waste my life trying to build models of something that is totally inadequate to explain the inner world, I want to at least entertain an idea that does easily allow for it.

>>9293957
Why not? Consciousness is probably the most sensible thing to come out of evolution when you consider how even reproduction is still lethal in a natural setting, nevermind eating and water and oh god forbid we actually spend some goddamn time in this place.
It's certainly subject to all the flaws that comes with other human features like "jimmy fucked his sister and now his kid ain't right in the head".
>>9293952
An inner world is required in the first place for any realistic predictive capacities in a complicated world such as ours. See? I can use misleading words to my advantage too.
In any case having said inner world is advantageous in an evolutionary perspective according to >>9293957, so your horseshit is clearly not sticking to every wall.

>>9293919

They've demonstrated the same with humans who have had traumatic injuries and report no longer having a visual field.

>>9293970
look all I'm saying is that if I get to act blind for a few hours every week and take home a cheque for being a test subject it probably wouldn't be worse than my last job
put on a blindfold, make this an ESP test, we'll see how far they go.

>>9293968
>An inner world is required in the first place for any realistic predictive capacities in a complicated world such as ours. See?

No it's not. All that's required for excellent predictive capacities is a machine with sufficiently well-defined instructions to assimilate information and adapt.

Intelligence /= an inner world. A computer of sufficient sophistication, but no inner world would not have any trouble adapting to problems.

>said inner world is advantageous in an evolutionary perspective

No shit, but I didn't acknowledge it's origins in that process.

Just because something is advantageous in evolution doesn't mean it was produced by it, it just means it will be more successful.

What I'm saying is that an inner world is one method of adaption. How successful is this adaption relative to an automaton? I don't know, it gives the being the idea to consider that it's considering.

But the point is the idea you're proposing doesn't explain the inner world or its origins to begin with, it explains why a sophisticated machine is advantagous.

>>9293968
Maybe the inner world encourages us to be more contemplative, the resulting intellectual tradition might encourage academic behaviour in general, science growing out of philosophy.

If you want to know how an interior world might be a successful adaptation.

But we're not really arguing about the successfulness of a creature with an interior world vs an automaton, we're arguing about whether or not you can explain the existence of an interior world in purely mechanical terms without invoking Qualia of some description.

So far you have been unable to do that and have repeatedly described something which doesn't have to be conscious to function as you think it should.

>>9293992
So you're willing to admit that something would be advantageous in an evolutionary perspective, then comes asking how it came to be.
The answer to that one is that the period of evolution that we were allowed was sufficiently long enough for us to arrive at this feature, in the same way that it was long enough for us to form eyes, mouths, penises, vaginas, anuses, toenails, toenail jam, earwax, and everything else.
How you come to accept everything else that's so freakishly strange on a human body yet shudder at the thought of consciousness is beyond me.

Lastly, this golden egg of a quote right here:
>Intelligence /= an inner world. A computer of sufficient sophistication, but no inner world would not have any trouble adapting to problems.
Define the problem itself as "creating a consciousness for itself, so as to gain an evolutionary advantage over biological adversaries".
Do you see where this is going?

>>9293973

That's not the point I was trying to make anon. The point is that they have massive brain damage to their visual processing centers (verified by all sorts of scans), report having no visual experiences at all, yet can still react to objects in the world. I'm not saying they are psychic or something.

>>9294005
I'm willing to admit that Qualia might be a successful feature, I'm not suggesting Qualia emerged from evolution, you are.

That's getting the cart before the horse.

All of that other crap is perfectly well explained by physics as it stands, Qualia is not.

>Do you see where this is going?

Yes, I do. You will continue to fail to create models of a conscious being and assert to yourself that it constitutes a conscious being.

And just because something is advantageous, doesn't mean even over time I will aquire it when it's not physically possible for me to do so. It might be more advantageous in terms of lifespan if I spontaneously became a fucking star, but I won't because that's not possible.

>>9294009
>they can't see anything
>but they can see things
>you get me?
No, I'm afraid I don't. A claim to psychic abilities really was my best guess. I don't see how qualia functions as anything other than a placeholder for psychic in these implications.

>>9294025

I mean that the patient says 'I don't have any kind of visual experiences', but when they for example ask her, are we showing you something right now? The patient says yes if they are. Or if they ask, is this object we are holding round or not, she can answer it. It seems unlikely that the patient is lying, because she is both answering correctly and a part of her brain is physically heavily damaged. Also the same symptoms occur with damage to the same part of the brain.

>>9294017
It's not up to you to define what's possible and what's not. You have to demonstrate it instead.
For example, I can as a matter of fact demonstrate that it is possible for simple atoms to result in consciousness.
Exhibit A: earth, a shitton of time ago, with nothing but water and rocks.
Exhibit B: present day, some fucknugget on 4chan claiming that he is not a product from said water and rocks, despite literally. every. single. other. fucking. thing. about him. being. from. said rocks and water.

>>9294033
>It's not up to you to define what's possible and what's not. You have to demonstrate it instead.

Yours and others consistent failure to build a model of a being with an interior world, producing instead adaptive automaton after adaptive automaton, inadequately describing how this creates an interior world gives me inductive reason to believe that we ought to entertain another theory to explain the existence of this interior world.

>For example, I can as a matter of fact demonstrate that it is possible for simple atoms to result in consciousness.

You can't, you can exhibit behaviours of rationalization that are coming alarmingly close to the psychotically self-deluded.

>>9294033
Also take your frustration and shove it you little bitch. Preferably the same place you keep your head tucked away in judging by the shitty quality of your ability to explain.

>>9294056
>>9294048
You have still yet to demonstrate that qualia itself is impossible to construct from "mechanical" happenings. I have demonstrated that "mechanical" happenings, such as those that occurred since earth was sterile till now, resulted in you, who does have a consciousness.
What value is there left in this conversation? Who would read these words and still believe in consciousness as a thing separate from the same chemical and physical actions of the world, one that requires its own explanation beyond a better understanding of the atoms and cells that composes us? How much more attention must be fed into this supposed problem just so research positions can be taken up by people who are convinced that there is an aether that makes mankind special in the head? What fantastical belief do you want to instill in people next?

>>9294085
>You have still yet to demonstrate that qualia itself is impossible to construct from "mechanical" happenings

Refer to my above inductions.

Suggesting that I go from inductions, and merely exploring what might constitute an explanations to full blown proof is the refuge of the scoundrel. It's like asking Newton to explain universal gravitation as he nurses a bruise under the apple tree.

> I have demonstrated that "mechanical" happenings, such as those that occurred since earth was sterile till now, resulted in you, who does have a consciousness.

And correlation does not equal causation, all of the explained phenomena has so far proven inadequate in showing a causal relationship to consciousness, so all of the so far explained phenomena in my physical body is merely a correlate of consciousness. I'm prepared to accept there's an as-yet unexplained phenomena that causes consciousness, and I call this Qualia. It's a hypothesis worth exploring.

>What value is there left in this conversation?

Establishing hypothesis worth exploring.

What you don't understand is that YOU are being presumptuous and not me, you presume to be able to explain consciousness with already explained physical phenomena despite repeatedly failing to do so and yet you have the nerve to presume to rule out my hypothesis altogether.

The value of conversations like these is establishing, that alternative explanations and questions such as the hard problem are worth exploring.

And so maybe I'm wrong, I'm overwhelmingly of the belief that your view is ontologically impossible as it flouts Cogito Ergo Sum, but it's worth exploring my argument and at least ruling it out when we're at a loss with regards to the origins of consciousness so far.

It's not like I'm suggesting Pixies run special magic in our head to bring us to life.

>>9293872
You wouldn't expect it to be in a "higher level" part of the brain because it's not just some random abstraction a person learns to work with like the concept of money. It's an abstraction that's integrated into your behavior before you even learn how to speak or walk. It works similarly to the abstractions of money or numbers in the sense that it's also a case of treating non-real placeholders like real things, but it's not exactly the same since unlike with money or numbers you don't need to be taught by your parents or a school to work with them. There's nothing weird about having abstractions at either of those two levels, even simple computer programs have a concept of scope with different levels where the same kind of resource can be made available.
If anything I'd argue blindsight is a super-compelling piece of evidence in favor of "qualia" not literally existing because you can demonstrate cases where brain damage results in a person still having the ability to do some things in response to visual stimuli like avoid an obstacle in their path but unable to do more sophisticated things like describing how the thing in their path "looks" (or even just being aware enough of the thing to speak about it at all depending on the specifics of their brain problem).
This means we have a concrete example of how whether or not someone reports having "qualia" can be explained in terms of physiology (the brain problem) and behavior (e.g. whether or not they can describe features of the object their eyes are getting stimuli off of). This pushes back against the Chalmers stance that "qualia" is something distinct from the physical body or its behavior that can be present or absent with all else kept equal since we have a case where whether the "qualia" is reported is pretty well associated with physical differences in the brain and behavioral differences in the subject, and you can argue these differences *are* the entirety of what causes reports of "qualia."

>>9294109
>and you can argue these differences *are* the entirety of what causes reports of "qualia."

You can, and you can also argue that the already explained things are merely correlates and that there's something as you unexplained that actually causes it.

Like I said, I'm not suggesting magic or pixies, just unexplained phenomena. What's so crazy about that? We recently discovered the Higgs-Boson, something that was predicted to explain phenomena otherwise inexplicable by the pre-existing particles.

>>9294123
As yet unexplained*

>>9294123
>We recently discovered the Higgs-Boson, something that was predicted to explain phenomena otherwise inexplicable by the pre-existing particles.
Yes, and that's because that example was something that explained a real world influence (namely a difference in expected particle mass).
Now I know a lot of anons here believe "qualia" count as a real world influence, but there is absolutely no case that has ever been identified of a physical phenomenon that happened differently than what was predicted because of the additional factor of "qualia" changing things. Whether "it" is there or not our brains and bodies and everything else about the world operate in exactly the way you'd expect from physical principles alone. No physicist is under the impression some unexplained discrepancy between current physics predictions and empirical results is due to "qualia." The only thing this concept is posited to explain is why it is that we report it existing. And that to me is very strong evidence that the issue here is with our behavior of acting like this "thing" exists rather than the issue being one of the physical world doing something additional we haven't learned enough about yet.

>>9294147
>but there is absolutely no case that has ever been identified of a physical phenomenon that happened differently than what was predicted

Are you suggesting that a world without qualia is indistinguishable from a world of p-zombies?

There are people who would suggest p-zombies are incoherent and that such a world is altogether impossible.

>>9294147
A world with qualia is indistinguishable from a world of p-zombies*

>>9294147
But there IS something currently unexplained in our world, the existance of an interior world altogether and it MERITS explanation, an explanation that current physics has been so far inadequate to deliver.

>>9294153
I'm saying I don't think "qualia" exist outside of our behaving around the concept of them as though they existed.
And I'm saying that because this alleged "qualia" thing has absolutely no footprint to be found on any aspect of the physical world. Since they only ever come up in a way others can validate when mentioned as a reference point in a report someone provides about their "experience," I'm pretty convinced that's exactly what they are: reference points for reports and behavior, and not literal objects or even literal qualities of objects.

>>9294109

You've made a convincing point that it could be interpreted that way as well. So in either case it allows us to restrict our attention to one part of the brain with regard to empirical claims about 'visual' qualia/'sensory beliefs'.

However I disagree slightly with the argument for qualia being purely physical. Imagine you have a sandbox and you drag a stick across it. The pattern in the sand is exactly equivalent to the movements you make with the stick. However the pattern is not 'equal' to the stick, its a consequence of the stick. Similarly its possible that qualia are invoked by physical processes, but not equal to them. In fact in the same way that the sand offers physical resistance to being pushed by the stick, qualia (if they exists) could perhaps also have an effect upon physical processes in some manner (perhaps why we evolved it).

>>9294168
>I'm saying I don't think "qualia" exist outside of our behaving around the concept of them as though they existed.

What you're suggesting, whether you know it or not is not is that we have no interior world. And yet earlier you were rationalizing the existence of one unsuccessfully.

>>9294177
The pattern in the sand wouldn't exist if you removed the stick from the situation.
If "qualia" were like that example then we could test that by trying to find the physical phenomena caused by "qualia."
No such physical phenomena have ever been found though. It's more like a stick that when rubbed against sand leaves the sand completely unchanged.

>>9294180
I don't understand what your post here is saying or asking and I'd also recommend not trying to assume I'm the same person making a bunch of past posts you've read in this thread because there are multiple people posting here.

>>9294193
Fair enough.

>>9294157
There is not the slightest bit of physical world phenomena that had ever been established as influenced in any sort of way by your alleged "interior world." All we have as independently corroborated data are reports of "interior worlds."

>>9294186
Supposing I made the assumption that my interior world could be classed as "phenomena", whether you want to call that physical or not.

This would merit explanation.

>>9294200
>There is not the slightest bit of physical world phenomena that had ever been established as influenced

And we should stop investigating?

>your alleged "interior world."

I'm not going to deny that I exist. Or that I observe.

If I did that I'd have to put in doubt every physical observation I've ever made in addition.

>>9294186

If qualia are invoked only in sufficiently complex information systems, then one would assume their effects would be apparent only in such systems. I.e. it wouldn't necessarily manifest in say a particle accelerator. It could also be something very subtle, like slightly synchronizing the firing patterns of sets of neurons toward a 'goal frequency' or increasing membrane permeability by 1%, or any number of other nearly undetectable changes which might still be of evolved benefit. Scientists know that a large chunk of IQ, the most tangible psychological invariant, is heritable, yet are unable to explain most the heritability down to specific genes due to each gene having a minute effect. Consciousness could be similarly elusive in its physical effects, maybe it only really adds up when you take into account billions of synapses etc.

>>9294207
>And we should stop investigating?
You're welcome to try looking for an example of a physical world impact caused by "qualia." I don't think you're going to find one though.
If you someone found such an example it would raise the question of how we were able to get by on physics and chemistry as they currently exist for so long if they were neglecting to include a real part of the world that changes how predictions need to be calculated.
That's kind of the point here: No one even needs to deliberately look for an example of real world impact like that because if it did exist then it would've already been stumbled upon when all those physics and chemistry predictions would be off due to not factoring in "qualia." And no one has ever ran into that problem under any circumstances ever tested.

>>9294207
>If I did that I'd have to put in doubt every physical observation I've ever made in addition.
You're supposed to doubt personal observations to some extent if you're doing something important like conducting a formal experiment for an a academic journal or working on a criminal trial.
We mostly never have perfect knowledge of the real world, but you can increase the reliability of observations by checking them against separate independent parties' observatons as well as against non-observation based mathematical models.
It would not be a good thing if you could convict a man for an alleged crime on the basis of one witness report alone. Our reliability as independent observers is not very good at all.
Also this is all somewhat beside the point since we're conflating data obtained from our senses with the notion of having information on "what it was like" to take in that data.
Doubting the latter's existence as something more than a behavioral routine doesn't equate to doubting the former. You can be skeptical about the literal reality of "qualia" without it having any necessary impact on how much you doubt or don't doubt the information you gathered from your sensory systems. Just because "qualia" aren't literally real doesn't mean your sensory organs were collecting junk data.

>>9294330
>>9294365
As much as I disagree that we would have already stumbled on it, I calculate that's the end of this argument.

There's nothing more productive to say. We just have to continue thinking and experimenting to attempt to justify our assumptions.

>Just because "qualia" aren't literally real doesn't mean your sensory organs were collecting junk data.

Not necessarily, but if I doubt my own existence or Qualia, I doubt the medium of my observation. Maybe I'm not collecting junk data but I have no reason whatever to trust that I'm not, technically "I'm" not collecting any data at all, there is no "me" in your scheme.

>>9294446
There's still a person taking in data under this framework of interpretation, it just isn't a person with literal "qualia" phenomena. By analogy, just because a robot with a mounted camera doesn't have "qualia" doesn't mean it can't collect data or respond to it / report it.
Even in a hypothetical world where "qualia" did exist as a literal real thing that could be accounted for by some new science its presence or absence wouldn't have an effect on the reliability of a sending system's data e.g. there could still be robots with cameras in that world and you wouldn't expect them to produce flawed reports just because they had no "qualia."

Bump

>>9289326
BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE
CANDYMAN CANDYMAN CANDYMAN CANDYMAN CANDYMAN
PEPE PEPE PEPE PEPE PEPE PEPE PEPE

Qualia, inner world, etc. are all just nonsense mumbo jumbo terms.

It's just another form of a homunculus, it doesnt explain anything. So why do people fall for it? I think it has to do with their religious/spiritual beliefs. If human intelligence is reducible to physical interactions then there isnt room for a soul.

It's hard to cling to your god/mother gaia of the gaps if there are no gaps left.

>>9293872
Proves nothing once you consider a whole lot of vision is subcortical in the thalamus and midbrain and that v1 isnt the only entry route of visual information into the cortex.

>living on a speck of dust flying in endless space

Some things will never make sense to us.

We did not design our biology, evolution did.

Understanding the sensation of our inner world is akin to a bacteria trying to understand our world without being removed from itself.

Whatever "it" is disappears where were asleep only to return like an operating system following next morning.

>>9292003
>Brains are simple
kek

the only solution is solipsism. there is nothing that "causes" consciousness because it doesn't exist outside of your self.

>>9292003
Look into Near Death Experiences

>Psychologists still don't know WHERE consciousness is in our brains
Nigga shut the fuck up it's not magic.

>>9289862
>one day be explained through updates to physics and chemistry

No, you really don't get it. There ought to be no need to update physics, as the study of qualia would be a science onto itself, as an extension of psychology/cognitive science. We're not claiming that qualia is somehow 'separate' from the chain of cause and effect that underlies physics, instead we're pointing out that physics simply has no way of accounting for why we say experience the color red the way we do, and that there is an additional need to understand how the "red experience" correlates/is caused by the structural aspects of the brain and what is actually required for that to occur.

The "color red as a visual experience caused by the brain" is a different sort of thing as "a statistical model of an electron" and should be studied differently as appropriate, though general scientific techniques can be applied to both to build up an understanding of how these 'things' each take part in the universe.

>>9297140
>there is an additional need to understand how the "red experience" correlates/is caused by the structural aspects of the brain
If this alleged "qualia" phenomenon is caused by something physical (i.e. the brain), then that amounts to acknowledging there ought to be some evidence you can identify of its impact on the physical world.
This is the main reason Cartesian dualism is considered an insult today: The idea alleged non-physical phenomena have some sort of causal relationship with physical phenomena (like the brain) is not supported by any evidence at all. There has never once been even the slightest indication "qualia" has interacted with the brain, which is a major reason behind why so many people are on board with the notion this "qualia" thing never really existed in the first place.

>>9297140
I think it's hard to take the hard problem seriously unless you make the metaphysical jump and say that the scientific model of the world is clearly missing something when it comes to consciousness, and has to be expanded upon in some way to account for phenomenal consciousness.

With a scientific worldview, phenomenal experiences have no place, they just don't exist. Particles follow the laws of physics, and things just happen. All there is to explain is how things function. If phenomenal experiences are to be accounted for, then it seems a world fundamentally needs more than just function. To say that all we need to do is understand some high level biological/psychological, and the mysteries of consciousness will just click into place, is to make the hard problem into one of the very easy problems it contrasts itself against.

>>9296414

You don't think looking at something vividly red is a pretty strange experience if that red is merely a 'belief'? I would argue that strict materialism is at least equally motivated by the need to maintain a framework of thought. We don't know whether qualia exist or what their nature is, in the same way that we don't know whether a higher power exists. You can make the argument that it would be an unnecessary assumption, but at the end of the day that is just a heuristic assumption.

>>9296711

Why I posted that is precisely to show that the subjective experience of vision and its effects upon information processing as dissociable. I agree that the LGN/Thalamus are probably still working, and even limited V1 pockets of function sometimes remain.

>>9296789

You could be fully conscious the entire time you are sleeping, but unaware of it the next morning if your brain did not store those periods of consciousness in episodic memory -- in the same way that you can sometimes drive to work, but in hindsight not remember a thing due to it being so habitual that hippocampal episodic memory storage is not triggered.

>>9297315

You trust your brain to look at scattering data of electrons and conclude that a strict particle theory of electromagnetism is inadequate, yet when the same brain tells you that something ~qualitatively~ unique is occurring when you experience qualia you attribute that to a simple false belief. Sure, logically that could perhaps be true, but why do we instinctively repel at such an idea? When someone explains to a person that their experience of causality, self-hood, and spurious memories are false they are much more willing to consider that. I would argue that this stubbornness is at least circumstantial physical evidence that there is more to the story.

What does /sci/ think of David Chalmers and his views on consciousness?

>>9297356
See? You just use verbosity to try and hide how crazy what you're saying actually is.

This is the same reasoning people used to explain how living things grew before they knew what cells are.

Someone called these "qualia" aether of the mind. Thats the perfect comparison. It's a halfassed explanation that doesn't turn out to be true and created more problems than it solved. Maybe you are an enurgumen like you're saying. But it isnt qualia that's haunting you. It's just schizoaffective thinking.

>>9298444
You have far too closed an idea of what it means to 'exist'. I want to make something clear first, specifically why it is meaningful to say that qualia is in some sense independent of the scope of physics, but that this does NOT mean that it is independent of the physical (which is a massively important distinction).

We first need to understand what physics actually is, in the sense of how it provides an abstraction of reality. Physics deals with how particular structures effect other particular structures, i.e. how we can create abstractions can predict how a measurement ought to predict other measurements based on models of what should occur.

The problem is that the specific abstractions that physics deals with don't incorporate phenomenal experience. This doens't mean that physics couldn't be 'complete' without taking such things into account, any more that it is lacking because it doesn't deal directly with ideas such as computability. The study of phenomenology/cognitive science abstracts reality in a different way, giving a different view of what is likely fundamentally the same thing at its core, but in a way that would make no sense for physics to deal with.

In a certain sense, physics may be irrelevant to understanding the nature of qualia for the same reasons that computer science isn't part of physics, the correlation between the "physical structures of the brain" and "what we perceive in our visual field", why this occurs and how we might theorize about it (such as coming up with a way to predict in principal what neural activity should result in an experience of a color), is surely a valuable topic in itself. This is naturally something that no current physical theory has anything much of merit to say on.

>>9297356
>You don't think looking at something vividly red is a pretty strange experience if that red is merely a 'belief'?
That's the thing about brain mediated beliefs though, there is absolutely no limit at all to what you can be made to believe and to what degree of intensity you can be made to believe it. So saying you think some phenomenon you believe is appearing to you is "vivid" is not really evidence of anything except that you're exhibiting the reporting behavior of saying some phenomenon you believe is appearing to you is "vivid."
>I would argue that strict materialism is at least equally motivated by the need to maintain a framework of thought.
Motivations are irrelevant. Newton could have been motivated by the desire to torture future school children by inflicting calculus upon them and it wouldn't make calculus any less valid. Speculating about motivation is a lazy argument that tries to go after the person you're disagreeing with instead of the ideas they're asserting.
>You trust your brain to look at scattering data of electrons and conclude that a strict particle theory of electromagnetism is inadequate, yet when the same brain tells you that something ~qualitatively~ unique is occurring when you experience qualia you attribute that to a simple false belief.
That's just not true. Electromagnetism is not supported solely by a single person's observations. That's the fundamental difference between these two sorts of claims here. You don't personally and as a single uncorroborated party get to establish the validity of electromagnetic theory based on what you alone believe you saw.
>I would argue that this stubbornness is at least circumstantial physical evidence that there is more to the story.
I think if anything it's the complete opposite of that. Stubbornness is a hallmark of false beliefs e.g. there's a known phenomenon of stroke victims emphatically insisting their arm isn't paralyzed when it obviously is.

>>9293741
Have you ever heard of Phineas Gage. Or do you even know about the wide spread practice of lobotomies during the 20th century?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

>>9299735
The problem is that you aren't taking yiur thorazine

>>9289897
>intelligence is the automaton part of us (by biology and chemicals)
How does an automata become aware that it's an automata?

>>9300699
You can be functionally aware and phenomenally aware. For the first, it just needs to process information that let's it have a model of its own functioning, in the same sense as a self driving car is "aware" of the road and itself in it.
(the last one is much harder)

>>9299782

>there is absolutely no limit at all to what you can be made to believe

Your proof for this is?

>Speculating about motivation is a lazy argument that tries to go after the person you're disagreeing with instead of the ideas they're asserting.

It was a reply to a person who asserted that believing in qualia is motivated by religiosity.

>You don't personally and as a single uncorroborated party get to establish the validity of electromagnetic theory based on what you alone believe you saw.

Except that every single normal human queried will report having subjective experiences. The point was epistemological, though. You trust your brain to be able to correctly tell you about the external world to the extent that you can establish a belief in the correctness of science, yet at the same time maintain that the most striking aspect of human consciousness (subjective experiences) are very convincing false beliefs. So if our brain can trick us so easily, how do you know that you know anything?

>Stubbornness is a hallmark of false beliefs e.g. there's a known phenomenon of stroke victims emphatically insisting their arm isn't paralyzed when it obviously is.

That's a completely different beast, though. Those patients often have some introspective experiences from pre-existing neural circuits related to propioception, which mimic the feedbacks they would have received under normal circumstances. How can you be deceived about the color red? Either you have the subjective experience or not, there is no propositional structure there.

>>9297356
Your example doesnt argue for qualia. Just that some brain areas are more necessary for consciousness dumbass.

>>9300746
>Those patients often have some introspective experiences from pre-existing neural circuits related to propioception, which mimic the feedbacks they would have received under normal circumstances.
No, I'm not talking about people reporting that they feel an arm, I'm talking about a relatively common phenomenon where these patients come up with all sorts of completely ridiculous rationalizations for why their arm isn't paralyzed like claiming the clearly paralyzed arm the doctor is looking at actually belongs to the patient in the bed next to theirs.
This is also the answer to this question incidentally:
>Your proof for this is?
Yes, I'd recommend checking out some Oliver Sacks books (e.g. The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat), he's a neurologist known for exploring these types of really bizarre brain mediated false beliefs, and yes, you can end up believing literally anything at all and are entirely at the mercy of your brain in this respect. Not just in cases of neurological malady either, in fact everyone goes through something very similar to this almost every single night: dream delusions. A relatively small number of dreams result in the dreamer realizing the events of their dream is absurd and either gaining lucidity while still asleep or just waking up, but much more often you blindly accept anything as true. And also to address this:
>Either you have the subjective experience or not, there is no propositional structure there.
You would be surprised how much insane rationalization determines what you think is happening to you or has happened to you at any given point in time. Cases like what got covered by Sacks are a great resource for learning how our brains really operate when it comes to what we believe and how we behave since these cognitive processes really are a lot like stage magic i.e. very mysterious and baffling at first but when you see it go wrong it becomes a lot clearer how the tricks are really being pulled off.

>>9300784

I.e. for invoking qualia, dumbass.

>>9300746
>Except that every single normal human queried will report having subjective experiences.
Exactly, every single case you're talking about is a *report*. That's the real thing we have evidence of: reporting behavior.

FYI I wrote these:
>>9300793
>>9300801
And not these:
>>9300784
>>9300795
Don't want you to think I'm calling you a dumbass. I'd personally prefer not to deal with discussion about the person making arguments at all since that doesn't really have much to do with whether the arguments themselves make sense.

>>9300793

Yeah I'm aware of Sacks. However lets say you are right, then literally anything could be a false belief, which means you can't trust any of your reasoning faculties, so its contradictory for you to assume that you can make that argument in the first place with such faulty faculties. Secondly, its impossible to make this argument fruitful in any case until there is more physical evidence of what is going on in the brain when certain subjective experiences are processed. I.e. can everything be accounted for 100% within the confined of a non-qualia theory. We might think that is true and lay out strong arguments for it being so, but that is not evidence in itself.

>>9300801

Fair enough, I concede that there is such a limitation in self-reported info.

>>9300793
>A relatively small number of dreams result in the dreamer realizing the events of their dream is absurd and either gaining lucidity while still asleep or just waking up

What are dreams then but an experience of qualia that doens't correlate to any current real world event? The way you're using the existence of dreams to argue against qualia, when they in themselves specifically show how qualia can occur in the absence of external stimuli, is strange to me. The whole point of the concept of qualia is to describe sensory experience independently of whether or not that experience is an illusion/i.e. regardless of how much it relates to the rest of the world. If I can't take this as a self evident axiom then what do you suggest is the case otherwise?

>>9300811
>However lets say you are right, then literally anything could be a false belief,
I don't see how that could ever not be the case.
>which means you can't trust any of your reasoning faculties,
I wouldn't personally take this leap of assigning absolutely equal value to the plausibility of all propositions. You can be wrong about anything, but that doesn't necessarily mean you are equally likely to be wrong about any one thing as you are likely to be wrong about any other thing. This is basically the premise underlying why we have a scientific method in the first place, isn't it? The idea is we ought to check ourselves to some extent and not base what we believe in 100% on our own notion of what we think is going on as a single isolated observer and that we should instead compile evidence along with other independently observing parties and check all that against non- observational abstract / mathematical models too so as to at least try to approach a more reliable ground for understanding what's really going on in the world.
>so its contradictory for you to assume that you can make that argument in the first place with such faulty faculties.
It's imperfect, like any other attempt at knowledge, but a lack of perfection doesn't need to equate to giving up and not even bothering to differentiate between what we do have reason to believe in vs. what we don't have much reason to believe in.

>>9300820
>What are dreams then but an experience of qualia that doens't correlate to any current real world event?
So I think you're assuming there really is "qualia" there. What I personally think is that there isn't, and what dreams are is a lot like what waking life is as far as this "qualia" question goes, meaning the real situation is reports and behavior in reference to information which never literally appears as some non-physical phantasm.
The fact a dream doesn't correlate with a real world event doesn't mean a dream must have literal "qualia" things appearing, dreams can fail to correspond to real world events purely by being a behavioral process made in response to non-literally present information, much like a way more convoluted version of if you had a robot that was programmed to output reports based on data it collects from devices like a mounted camera. The robot would never need to literally see an image, it would only need to have some sort of behavior in reference to the information collected by its camera.

>>9300820
>>9300837
Also as a quick clarification, that robot example with the camera would of course correspond more with waking "qualia" report associated behavior, while a corresponding robot example for dreams would be if you had the robot shut down its camera at night and had it randomly transforming the information it collected in the absence of new information from the camera, maybe as a way to let the more important information persist and the less important information fall out of use if I'm trying to think of how it would best approximate how we think our own dreaming works.

>>9300825
>that we should instead compile evidence along with other independently observing parties

Which is exactly what we can do with qualia. We can inquire with other people about the nature of qualia they perceive to try to gague to what extent they might match up, run psychological experiments to figure out how things might differ from what we assume is going on, measure the activity of neurons and reason about their structure etc. but "non- observational abstract / mathematical models" are an area which we have made barely any progress on, but which I see no reason in principal why we might not advance them.

>So I think you're assuming there really is "qualia" there.

What do you mean by "there really is 'qualia' there"? Do you expect that qualia would have some specific effect on the world beyond naturally partaking in it? If so, then I deny that that's what qualia is.

I'm going to assume for a minute that you believe that happiness is 'good', or at least preferable and superior to misery for anyone who experiences it. If that is the case, what basis would you have for making that judgement? What is your conception of 'consciousness' in general and how do you believe it 'exists'?

Qualia is not a claim that everything that is observed physically can't be accounted for through physics. It's rather the acknowledgement of how manifestations of viewpoint operate through this structure.

>>9290018
I think you need to read later Witty. Supernatural as a legitimate word can definitely exist depending on the language game. It is you who is purposefully framing the question to get the answer you want.

>it's not real because my reality measuring tools can't measure it!

Science has become a mistake.

>>9300855
>Do you expect that qualia would have some specific effect on the world beyond naturally partaking in it?
If it's a real thing and not just a fictional reference that brains orchestrate behavior around then yes, we should expect some sort or interaction between it and something in the physical world that can be identified and measured.
If the physical world carries on in the same way regardless of any hypothetical qualia presence then there isn't much reason to believe this notion maps to a real world phenomenon and as such it would never be possible to "solve" this "problem" no matter how much time and how many resources were poured into investigating "it," much like if you tried to solve the "hard problem of numbers" and invested resources into trying to explain how the physical world makes numbers and why we can't account for them with current physics. The explanation in both cases is that these aren't real things in the first place, they're convenient fictions we behave around, and it's the wrong approach to think we're going to some day "discover" a new science to account for them because they aren't objects or even physical processes, they're just reference points for organizing behavior.
>>9302129
Structured artificial measuring tools are used instead of anecdotal stories about what people believe they observed for good reason. We have a very narrow range of natural ability to reliably infer what's happening in the world.

>>9302243
But we know what is happening in our inner world better than any artificial measurement.

>>9302539
no we don't. it's the other way around.

>>9302539
Just the opposite, there's a massive collection of research showing all the different ways our belief in what we think we've seen or heard or are remembering is a rationalization mediated story passing itself off as an "experience" (or to put it less nicely, an outright lie).
I'll give you one good example of this which is that you can change what people report hearing in a distorted recording by playing it without distortion after their first listen and before their second listen. If your "inner experience" of sound were really like what we're primed to believe it is then we'd hear the same sound twice. But because our hearing behavior is not how we're primed to believe it is, you can cause someone to believe they've heard noticeably different sounds the second time. Instead of literally "experiencing" sound in some pure and immediate way, we're really getting fed stories about having heard sound and those stories can be reliably screwed with to make you think the same sound is something different. The information and beliefs about our senses are actually more immediate than any hypothetical "qualia" of sound since they determine what we report that "qualia" is like.

>>9289334
aaah you're so fucking retarded it hurts, you're literally denying the one thing that you know inherently to be true

>>9293829
this

You can never prove anything. How can p zombies be real if people aren't real? How can truth be real if logic isn't real? How can real be real if it's unreal?

That I can't prove my inner life doesn't mean I don't experience it.

>>9302583
Riddle me this, dualism-chan:
Does an MRI have greater quality and/or quantity of information about the things it scans, or about its own mechanisms that allow for it to be able to accomplish scanning?
You might reasonably consider tools (a class of object to which both MRIs and sensory organs belong) to be more reliable when it comes to what they're targetting than they are when it comes to their own mechanisms.

>>9302622
you're falling back on the IT metaphor and assuming that the mind is a computer

>>9302576
Just because your experiences can be faulted doesnt mean you dont have experience.... dont conflate

>>9302782
You're the one conflating. It's not your "experience" that's faulty, it's your beliefs about having "experience."

>>9302790
Your belief is an experience. You cant unbind them as separate.

>>9302688
Of course the mind isn't a computer. If anything, the brain is. The mind isn't a thing at all, it's an abstraction of brain processes.
Also it's not enough to just complain a given analogy isn't appropriate, you need to actually show why specifically some aspect of an analogy turns out not to work if you want to make a real argument. Otherwise you're just asserting a baseless conclusion. Not that I even used computers in my last post as an example in the first place, but that's a separate issue I guess.

>>9302796
The existence or non-existence of "experience" is the exact thing this entire thread has been an argument about, you can't just say "it exists," you need some reasons / arguments for why we should think it actually does exist.

>>9302811
I think therefore i am. Is that not enough? Isnt it obvious?

>>9302806
Actually modern neuroscience says the brain as a computer is also very wrong.

>>9302806
>The mind isn't a thing at all, it's an abstraction of brain processes.

How can you say it's not a thing, and then say it is a thing?

It has to be something otherwise you wouldn't know how to use the word 'mind'. Words can only ever be and refer to 'something'. Even the word 'nothing'.

If consciousness was simply a product of the brain, then according to science, non-conscious matter is creating consciousness. That is about as illogical as you can get.

>>9302815
Nobody takes Cartesian dualism seriously anymore, I don't know why anons keep bringing it up. No, cognition isn't proof that "qualia" exist, even Chalmers / "hard problem" believers don't accept that hence why they argue p-zombies are plausible and will behave exactly like non-zombies do in every way except with "qualia," and this includes thinking since thoughts aren't "qualia" e.g. you could have a p-zombie who takes in the input of visual stimuli for a restaurant and has the idea to pull in and eat there without ever having any "qualia" appear to him since that'd just require collecting information, transforming information, and responding to it, all categories of tasks that an artificial machine could accomplish.
Also it's not relevant even if it were a good argument because it's an argument that you exist, not an argument that "qualia" exist.

>>9302834
Because you aren't getting what abstractions are. A baseball is a thing. The game of baseball is not a thing, it's an abstraction. A brain is a thing. Mind is not a thing, it's an abstraction. Abstractions are useful fictions we treat like objects and get shortcuts as an alternative to only ever working with literal real world details.

>>9302827
Well A) I didn't even use computers as the point of comparison in the first place, used MRIs, and B) that's not an argument even if I had used computers as the point of comparison because you're not actually showing any specific ways in which an analogy wouldn't work, you're just asserting that it wouldn't because "neuroscience."

>>9302837
Im not saying cogbition or qualia at all. I dont believe in cartesian dualism. Im just saying isnt your first person pov evidence. That is experience or what we meab wheb we say the word. Its tautologous. Do i have to prove that first person pov doesnt exist? If i make a new word for it do i have to prove it? If experience is valid how can i prove anything else if i gain knowledge through experience.

Im not arguing about qualia btw.

>>9302842

So you're making the distinction between the physical, and the non-physical.

Everything has a physical and non-physical equivalent. A baseball can be a physical thing, but the idea of a baseball is not. A game of baseball is a physical thing that can be watched, but also a non-physical thing that can be thought about.

The same can be said for consciousness which is non-physical. The brain is therefore the physical representation of consciousness.

>>9302847
I didnt see your analogy. All im saying is computers is a bad analogy for computers and theres alot of neurobiological/computational evidence to support this.

Is it possible for an entity to perfectly visualize the color red, without experiencing it?

Is it possible to prove that 2 entities visually experience the color red identically?

>>9302862
No and no.

>>9302862
Baseball is a physical thing but we can only represent it as a thought of our experience. Technically the only things we have is experience. We only have non physical things. The physical itself is a concept but only through non physical gaze. Completely hidden from us like with a veil.

>>9302862
The only proof of a physical world is that the things that come into our experience seem to be statistically consistent suggesting some generative process outside of experience which produces them. I.e. the physical world. But nonetheless we dont have direct access. Everything is seen in subjective experience. Even scientific concepts. Ther is no objective.

>>9302891
Cont. Our physical dualism is illusory. Instead it is monist nonphysically in terms of epistemics. And from statistical dependencies we can assume monost physical but that is hidden. There is no self consistent way of distinguishing physical and non physical

>>9302880

Why no?

>>9302882

Agreed, consciousness experiences both the physical and non-physical which are ultimately the same thing.

>>9302917

The term visualize used necessitates experience.

And because we dont have the capability to see if what someone else experiences is the same as what we do. That is because colours themselves seem arbitrary i think in that hypothetically we can switch them around in a thought experiment without effecting things physically. Maybe that isnt the case but im sure we dont have that answer yet if it were.

>>9302936

It's as if colour allows physical objects to be seen, but we don't need it to feel, or hear them etc.

>>9302958
Wtf you taking about .

>>9302958
If you being sarcastic i dont get why

>>9302837
>hence why they argue p-zombies are plausible and will behave exactly like non-zombies do in every way except with "qualia,"

Oh, so you're taking the idea the qualia, if it exists, is some 'optional' phenomena that doens't strictly correlate with physical structure but which exists semi-independently of it. I can see how you'd see that as being absurd, and I agree that this conception of it is flawed. I'm not dualist in this sense, I'm positing qualia as something that is at its core no different from what we call physical structure in an 'absolute' sense (i.e. there is only one 'substance' forming the substrate of reality, even if that substance may have many complex and discreet aspects) but which is a different kind of 'manifestation' of that reality (that which exists in respect to viewpoints of conscious beings, even if that viewpoint is heavily filtered) to what we model with the concept of particle interactions (which is also fuzzy in its own way, though it provides evidence for 'hard' physical laws).

>>9302996
How can you call it the same as physical structure when its activity in the brain interpreting energy waves. Qialia in ur sense is not at all like physical structure. Very different

>>9302996
But i agree the world is one substrate

>>9302806
>>9302622
okay I reread this and I think I understand what you're talking about but I'm not sure how it's relevant
you're comparing (if I'm interpreting this right) something like an eye to something like a camera, and saying that the camera "knows" what it's seeing but doesn't "know" itself, and implying that the same is true for the eye
though I agree with this, that doesn't really relate to consciousness at all as far as I can see, but again, I could have misinterpreted you

Reading this is like a man telling me about being a woman

>>9303015
>How can you call it the same as physical structure

I'm not in the sense you mean, I agree that qualia is an 'interpretive' act that's quite distinct from the physical structure in its qualities, but that they share a single basis in reality.

>>9303017
Yes

>>9303060
It demonstrates that he is confused. Clearly we don't know how our own mind is physically structured from the perspective of conscious experience, and no one is claiming to know. That's why the 'hard problem' is so hard in the first place. The point is that we do know the qualia experience directly, and it's the only thing we can really know because it doens't matter whether or not or how it correlates to some external reality, the experience just is and so it's meaningless to say that it's an illusion of itself somehow.

>>9303397
>The point is that we do know the qualia experience directly

Be careful about using "we" so freely there. The more I talk about consciousness with people the more open to the possibility I become that most people are actual philosophical zombies. Explaining the concept of qualia to some people is like explaining vision to a blind person.

>>9303397
What if i say experience is physical too. Im not a dualist. But im saying experience exists and that physical-nonphysical isnt a coherent ontological or epistemological distinction.

>>9303528
But if we havr the same brains, skepticism of consciousness becomes too conservative and illogical.

>>9303528
When you ignore statistical dependency you become illogical. Ockhams razor

>>9304213
We don't have the same brains. They differ both slightly in genetics, and a lot in how connections are made.

>>9304222
Not sure what argument you're making here.

>>9304288
No we dont but we have the same statistical structure. Im basically saying that because of the similarity of brains we have good reason to make these inferences. Your issue isnt a problem of us having evidence or not. Its of being conservative or liberal with it.