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As far as I can tell, neither you nor that article are responding to the sentence you quoted. The argument made in that sentence is something like: if we come

by slibhb 5y ago

As far as I can tell, neither you nor that article are responding to the sentence you quoted. The argument made in that sentence is something like: if we come up with a description of how a bunch of photons interact with an eye to trigger a series of chemical reactions that lights up a bunch of neurons in a way that is proven to represent some mental image then, per Nagel, even if we achieved this, our explanation of sight would be missing something. The thing it would be missing is the subjective experience of seeing, something most of us are familiar with. Nagel isn't saying that this subjective experience is something other than physical or material. He's saying that the brand of materialism currently in vogue cannot account for this subjective experience and so needs to be revised.

yokljo 5y ago
What I find most interesting about your comment is the words "something most of us are familiar with", because it implies that consciousness is a two-way communication. It affects the physical world: If it didn't, then you wouldn't be typing those words. This is important if true, because it means you could absolutely scientifically prove its existence by measuring it. I'm not taking any sides here, but just making a point.
Comevius 5y ago
Subjective experiences seem mystical to us, because how could physics could cause something like this. One way to understand it is that we as experiencing subjects are made of nodes that can make things up and we have no choice but to believe them. Our nodes happen to produce useful, reliable things for us (except maybe when we are dreaming or on drugs) but the nature of the things they produce is different than what we believe, and have no choice but to believe. Like when we experience fear we are basically acting like we do driven by these signals, but it's all theatre. Useful theatre might I add, but it's just signals and how we interpret them. Vision is also just signals, there is just a lot of processing at the nodes so we get increasingly useful signals. We don't get a bunch of pixels, we get shapes, or better yet faces, intentions, predictions, stories. The different parts of us do their jobs and a coherent picture is created. The most coherent picture is the first person view, but it is a fabrication. It's like a news report. The perceived self is a part of a stitched together story, not a central agent. The whole brain is the agent, however we only remember the story. The story is what ends up as a memory. The perceived self exist because I is an important context needed later for prediction, like the dimensions of your body and a lot more in a social environment. But your perceived self is not the actual you, just as your perceived world is not the actual world. The general idea is that the signals from the nodes are processed and fed to the hippocampus to create an episodic memory engram, which reactivates the nodes that contributed the signals. This is when subjective experience happens, after all the work is done. Granted the next time the nodes can rely on what happened before, so we are not philosophical zombies, we don't passively experience it all, but the central agent is only a useful theatre, we are multitudes under the veneer.

by slibhb 5y ago

yokljo 5y ago

What I find most interesting about your comment is the words "something most of us are familiar with", because it implies that consciousness is a two-way communication. It affects the physical world: If it didn't, then you wouldn't be typing those words. This is important if true, because it means you could absolutely scientifically prove its existence by measuring it. I'm not taking any sides here, but just making a point.

Comevius 5y ago

Subjective experiences seem mystical to us, because how could physics could cause something like this. One way to understand it is that we as experiencing subjects are made of nodes that can make things up and we have no choice but to believe them. Our nodes happen to produce useful, reliable things for us (except maybe when we are dreaming or on drugs) but the nature of the things they produce is different than what we believe, and have no choice but to believe. Like when we experience fear we are basically acting like we do driven by these signals, but it's all theatre. Useful theatre might I add, but it's just signals and how we interpret them. Vision is also just signals, there is just a lot of processing at the nodes so we get increasingly useful signals. We don't get a bunch of pixels, we get shapes, or better yet faces, intentions, predictions, stories. The different parts of us do their jobs and a coherent picture is created. The most coherent picture is the first person view, but it is a fabrication. It's like a news report. The perceived self is a part of a stitched together story, not a central agent. The whole brain is the agent, however we only remember the story. The story is what ends up as a memory. The perceived self exist because I is an important context needed later for prediction, like the dimensions of your body and a lot more in a social environment. But your perceived self is not the actual you, just as your perceived world is not the actual world. The general idea is that the signals from the nodes are processed and fed to the hippocampus to create an episodic memory engram, which reactivates the nodes that contributed the signals. This is when subjective experience happens, after all the work is done. Granted the next time the nodes can rely on what happened before, so we are not philosophical zombies, we don't passively experience it all, but the central agent is only a useful theatre, we are multitudes under the veneer.