4 ms·

You don't have any experiences? Weird, I see a colored-in world, enjoy the aroma of fresh coffee, don't enjoy the wet cold in winter, don't like being awakened

You don't have any experiences? Weird, I see a colored-in world, enjoy the aroma of fresh coffee, don't enjoy the wet cold in winter, don't like being awakened up from an engaging dream, and feel a mild sense of irritation by humans pretending not be conscious because of their materialistic commitments.

naasking 3y ago
> You don't have any experiences? I have "experiences", they just don't really have the properties that a naive interpretation of sensory data would entail. > mild sense of irritation by humans pretending not be conscious because of their materialistic commitments. Funny, because I feel a mild sense of irritation by humans pretending that their flawed senses yields some kind of direct observation of fundamental reality.
- goatlover 3y ago
  > I have "experiences", they just don't really have the properties that a naive interpretation of sensory data would entail. You don't think your experiences have sensations? > Funny, because I feel a mild sense of irritation by humans pretending that their flawed senses yields some kind of direct observation of fundamental reality. I never said anything about fundamental reality. I don't understand saying we're literal p-zombies. You have to explain away your sensations, dreams, inner dialog etc., by appealing to some theoretical commitment. I'm not claiming what consciousness is, only that we have it.
  - naasking 3y ago
    > You don't think your experiences have sensations? I don't think sensations are what they appear to be either. Eliminative materialism is very misunderstood. > I never said anything about fundamental reality But you did, by claiming that we have consciousness. The only reason you think you have consciousness is an alleged direct perception of subjective qualities. There are only two real paths to reconciliating this with some form of scientifically sound materialism: panspychism, where subjective qualities permeate all of reality and we are perceiving some of them, or concluding that our perceptions are flawed and untrustworthy and so the subjective qualities we think we're perceiving are not real/illusory (eliminative materialism). Given the demonstrable flaws in all other perceptions, the most parsimonious position seems clear. Of course, you could try to resurrect idealism, but idealism is very problematic. > I don't understand saying we're literal p-zombies. P-zombies believe they have consciousness, say they have it, write whole screeds about how absurd it is to claim they don't have it, but they don't have the subjective qualities as we've defined them. Sounds like a bullseye to me.
    - goatlover 3y ago
      > But you did, by claiming that we have consciousness. The only reason you think you have consciousness is an alleged direct perception of subjective qualities. We don't perceive subjective qualities, subjective qualities constitute our perceptions, dreams, memories and other conscious mental states. > There are only two real paths to reconciliating this with some form of scientifically sound materialism: If you have a commitment to doing so. I don't particularly, since materialism is model of how the world is constituted, abstracted from our shared conscious experiences. A very useful one with scientific backing. But nature is more than what we think it is (map/territory distinction). And there are other options you omitted such as identity theory, strong emergence, property dualism, neutral monism and cognitive closure. They all have their drawbacks, but so does every attempt to account for consciousness. > P-zombies believe they have consciousness, say they have it, write whole screeds about how absurd it is to claim they don't have it, but they don't have the subjective qualities as we've defined them. Sounds like a bullseye to me. Yes, but by definition, they lack the subjective qualities of our experiences. I believe Chalmers coined the term to demonstrate the problem with physicalism.
      - mannykannot 3y ago
        >> P-zombies believe they have consciousness, say they have it... > Yes, but by definition, they lack the subjective qualities of our experiences. And, also by definition, each p-zombie has (at least in an accessible possible world) a physically identical, but conscious, doppelgänger. Speaking and writing are physical processes, so in any circumstance where the conscious doppelgänger writes about the reality of its consciousness, the physically-identical p_zombie will do the same. In the case of the p-zombie, there was a causal process leading to the physical act of writing in which consciousness played no part - and, ex hypothesi, the same physical causality must have played out in the zombie's conscious doppelgänger. In general, whatever explains the zombie's observable characteristics is sufficient to explain the doppelgänger's observable characteristics, and that explanation cannot be dependent on consciousness. In particular, if one accepts the possibility of p-zombies, one must logically accept that no explanation of consciousness, regardless of how thorough and well-supported it seems to be, has any basis in any facts about consciousness. A consistent belief in zombies seems to lead to epiphenomenalism, the notion that we have conscious experiences, but they play no part in what happens to our bodies. Frank Jackson, author of the well-known "Mary the neuroscientist" thought experiment, came to the same conclusion, which is why it appeared in a paper with the title "Epiphenomenal Qualia." For more on zombies, see Dennett, "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies."
- svieira 3y ago
  Yet you observe them and don't put down their pretense to your flawed senses. Which suggests that something fundamental is impinging on your senses, however flawed your understanding of the underlying fundamentals may be.
  - naasking 3y ago
    > Yet you observe them and don't put down their pretense to your flawed senses. I do actually. I think this internal sense of subjective awareness is just as if not more flawed than our other senses, and it has yielded all sorts of false conclusions because people consider it more reliable. I liken it to the illusion of multitasking on single CPU computers. I think Graziano is on the right track: A conceptual framework for consciousness, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
    - svieira 3y ago
      Having read the paper he's rapidly on his way to materialistic solipsism - which is fine as a circle of hell, but it doesn't have any bearing on reality. Otherwise, he really isn't saying anything new from a philosophical perspective. Both Aristotle and St. Thomas long ago had a distinction between the act of sensing something and the act of naming (that is knowing) it. And noted that we can reflect on both of them. As he says: > Third, an attention schema cannot explain how a [non-empirically verifiable, non-material phenomena] emerges from the brain ... It explains how we believe, think, and claim to have such things, but it does not posit that we actually have [non-material phenomena] inside us. Having limited himself to only material things, he is necessarily constrained to only talk about epiphenomena if there is a non-material formal cause for the material phenomena. But empiricism is not all that is - there is no empirical proof for empiricism, it requires something outside of itself to support itself.

naasking 3y ago

> You don't have any experiences? I have "experiences", they just don't really have the properties that a naive interpretation of sensory data would entail. > mild sense of irritation by humans pretending not be conscious because of their materialistic commitments. Funny, because I feel a mild sense of irritation by humans pretending that their flawed senses yields some kind of direct observation of fundamental reality.

goatlover 3y ago
> I have "experiences", they just don't really have the properties that a naive interpretation of sensory data would entail. You don't think your experiences have sensations? > Funny, because I feel a mild sense of irritation by humans pretending that their flawed senses yields some kind of direct observation of fundamental reality. I never said anything about fundamental reality. I don't understand saying we're literal p-zombies. You have to explain away your sensations, dreams, inner dialog etc., by appealing to some theoretical commitment. I'm not claiming what consciousness is, only that we have it.
- naasking 3y ago
  > You don't think your experiences have sensations? I don't think sensations are what they appear to be either. Eliminative materialism is very misunderstood. > I never said anything about fundamental reality But you did, by claiming that we have consciousness. The only reason you think you have consciousness is an alleged direct perception of subjective qualities. There are only two real paths to reconciliating this with some form of scientifically sound materialism: panspychism, where subjective qualities permeate all of reality and we are perceiving some of them, or concluding that our perceptions are flawed and untrustworthy and so the subjective qualities we think we're perceiving are not real/illusory (eliminative materialism). Given the demonstrable flaws in all other perceptions, the most parsimonious position seems clear. Of course, you could try to resurrect idealism, but idealism is very problematic. > I don't understand saying we're literal p-zombies. P-zombies believe they have consciousness, say they have it, write whole screeds about how absurd it is to claim they don't have it, but they don't have the subjective qualities as we've defined them. Sounds like a bullseye to me.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    > But you did, by claiming that we have consciousness. The only reason you think you have consciousness is an alleged direct perception of subjective qualities. We don't perceive subjective qualities, subjective qualities constitute our perceptions, dreams, memories and other conscious mental states. > There are only two real paths to reconciliating this with some form of scientifically sound materialism: If you have a commitment to doing so. I don't particularly, since materialism is model of how the world is constituted, abstracted from our shared conscious experiences. A very useful one with scientific backing. But nature is more than what we think it is (map/territory distinction). And there are other options you omitted such as identity theory, strong emergence, property dualism, neutral monism and cognitive closure. They all have their drawbacks, but so does every attempt to account for consciousness. > P-zombies believe they have consciousness, say they have it, write whole screeds about how absurd it is to claim they don't have it, but they don't have the subjective qualities as we've defined them. Sounds like a bullseye to me. Yes, but by definition, they lack the subjective qualities of our experiences. I believe Chalmers coined the term to demonstrate the problem with physicalism.
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      >> P-zombies believe they have consciousness, say they have it... > Yes, but by definition, they lack the subjective qualities of our experiences. And, also by definition, each p-zombie has (at least in an accessible possible world) a physically identical, but conscious, doppelgänger. Speaking and writing are physical processes, so in any circumstance where the conscious doppelgänger writes about the reality of its consciousness, the physically-identical p_zombie will do the same. In the case of the p-zombie, there was a causal process leading to the physical act of writing in which consciousness played no part - and, ex hypothesi, the same physical causality must have played out in the zombie's conscious doppelgänger. In general, whatever explains the zombie's observable characteristics is sufficient to explain the doppelgänger's observable characteristics, and that explanation cannot be dependent on consciousness. In particular, if one accepts the possibility of p-zombies, one must logically accept that no explanation of consciousness, regardless of how thorough and well-supported it seems to be, has any basis in any facts about consciousness. A consistent belief in zombies seems to lead to epiphenomenalism, the notion that we have conscious experiences, but they play no part in what happens to our bodies. Frank Jackson, author of the well-known "Mary the neuroscientist" thought experiment, came to the same conclusion, which is why it appeared in a paper with the title "Epiphenomenal Qualia." For more on zombies, see Dennett, "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies."
svieira 3y ago
Yet you observe them and don't put down their pretense to your flawed senses. Which suggests that something fundamental is impinging on your senses, however flawed your understanding of the underlying fundamentals may be.
- naasking 3y ago
  > Yet you observe them and don't put down their pretense to your flawed senses. I do actually. I think this internal sense of subjective awareness is just as if not more flawed than our other senses, and it has yielded all sorts of false conclusions because people consider it more reliable. I liken it to the illusion of multitasking on single CPU computers. I think Graziano is on the right track: A conceptual framework for consciousness, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
  - svieira 3y ago
    Having read the paper he's rapidly on his way to materialistic solipsism - which is fine as a circle of hell, but it doesn't have any bearing on reality. Otherwise, he really isn't saying anything new from a philosophical perspective. Both Aristotle and St. Thomas long ago had a distinction between the act of sensing something and the act of naming (that is knowing) it. And noted that we can reflect on both of them. As he says: > Third, an attention schema cannot explain how a [non-empirically verifiable, non-material phenomena] emerges from the brain ... It explains how we believe, think, and claim to have such things, but it does not posit that we actually have [non-material phenomena] inside us. Having limited himself to only material things, he is necessarily constrained to only talk about epiphenomena if there is a non-material formal cause for the material phenomena. But empiricism is not all that is - there is no empirical proof for empiricism, it requires something outside of itself to support itself.