The problem with 'information' is that, as a general term, it doesn't mean anything. — Wayfarer

Interesting, it certainly seems to mean something. Definitely in everyday conversation it does. And so does it in the sense we are discussing, as something fundamental in the universe, alongside matter. Of course as with so many things, pinning down exactly what it means is nontrivial.

My experience with AI systems strongly suggests they do not possess this. — Wayfarer

I don't think LLMs could function as they do without understanding in some form (of course, without the sentience connotation the word usually caries). 'Intentionality' is out, and I'm not quite sure what 'normativity' is doing here.

I'll be sure to check out the thread, I like the topic.

Nifty OP. I had pretty much the exact same revelation, though not so artfully told. It led me to a kind of dualist perspective, where the universe consists of matter in all its forms, and information. Although information seems somehow parasitic on matter, in that it needs a material medium in one form or another to exist (not withstanding "it from bit" theories, which I don't understand).

That was part of my point: information does not exist in the absence of (an aspect of) consciousness. Characters on a printed page are not intrinsically information; it's only information to a a conscious mind that interprets it- so it's a relational property. — Relativist

I think you are talking about meaning, not information. Meaning is interpreted information. Also, there is no necessary involvement of consciousness. Machines can interpret information and derive meaning from it.

Ok, what's the plan? How do we understand it as informational? What do you have *ahem* in mind? — Patterner

Principles:
1. Consciousness is informational
2. Consciousness is naturalistic. (No woo!)
3. Consciousness arose due to selective pressure.

Why?
Given our principles, we can make an educated guess why consciousness arose. Consciousness is an extremely efficient means of organizing and processing information. Look at how we phenomenologically experience the information we receive. Sight as spatially organized, painted with color giving surface information. Sound as directionally and positionally co-located in space, but otherwise orthogonal to space. Smell as non-positional, and orthogonal to both. And so on. And then you have bodily awareness its own dimensions of feeling.

We integrate all of this, into a holistic sense of everything that is happening. And crucially, based on conscious and unconscious decision making, we can attend to a narrow band of the overwhelming amount of information we receive. Our slow-brain (aka conscious) processing of this information is experienced as thoughts, themselves phenomenal, but marked as interior. Experiences and thoughts trigger memories, also phenomenal. We integrate all this, make predictions, and ultimately act.

Contrast this with an organism trying to manage all this without consciousness. Just electrical signals, without qualitative feel. Imagine, from an engineering standpoint, the complexity of trying to organize a system that can integrate, analyze, and act on such an immense quantity of information. As the bandwidth and the number of streams of information grow, the task would become totally overwhelming.

TLDR:
Conscious brains DON'T process all information streams directly.
Conscious brians DO convert streams to conscious experiences, then process those.

As informational inputs from the environment and the self grow to a certain point, consciousness becomes mandatory.

Who
Given this, we can gain a better perspective on who we are. In one sense, we are human animals, we are our bodies. But in another sense, we are, specifically, the portion of the brain tasked with decision making. The portion that makes use of conscious information, attends to it, thinks about it, predicts with it, remembers it, and ultimately, acts. Everything that is not processed as phenomenal consciousness, to us, does not exist. It is unconscious.

We, the 'we' that experiences, that imagines a 'self', are the specific part of the brain that connect to the world, and to our own bodies, by phenomenal consciousness, and nothing more. And so at the same time, we are imprisoned by it.

What?
From our perspective, everything is conscious. To be aware of anything is to be conscious of it, definitionally. It is quite easy to mistake consciousness for reality. It is not. It is the result of intensive work by the brain, processing immense amounts of information so we may integrate and ultimately act on it.

Consciousness is unreal, where what is unreal exists in the head, but not outside it.
Consciousness is an illusion, where an illusion is that which presents as something it is not.
Consciousness is virtual, where the virtual exists only in terms of a system which supports it.

I think these facts are crucial to keep in mind. It is easier to explain something unreal, illusory, and virtual, rather than something real and actual. But still, the unreal still exists, as unreal. The illusion still exists, as illusion. Explanation is still required.

How?
This is all really framing for a revised hard problem:

How and why does biology's method of organizing information lead to qualitative states? How could any such method lead to qualitative states?

Of course I cannot answer this. But perhaps the preceding offers some context, and clues. We don't have to explain something that exists. Only something that exists, for us, from our own persepctive. We are already familiar with computers, information processing systems that can support arbitrary virtual worlds. I contend that the brain is the ultimate such system.

Still, there is a lot of mind bending to do. Computers can support virtual worlds. But they cannot support them as something experienced for themselves. Only for the user. I take it as axiomatic that consciousness is naturalistic, it unproblematically fits into the natural world as an informational phenomenon. But how does it work? Can we build such a machine? What are the principles? Can we program a computer so that it experiences? Or is this a kind of information processing that a computer cannot support?

Fundamental conceptual leaps still need to be made. But perhaps less fundamental than prodding pink tissue, and wondering how it could make the feels.

What do you mean by "consciousness is informational"? — Patterner

I mean that consciousness is best understood in terms of information, not physics. Some phenomena should be thought of as material: rocks, gravity, light. But others cannot be understood physically: numbers, ideas, computer programs, novels. I claim that consciousness belongs to the latter category.

Think of a book, Moby Dick. You could try to understand it physically: "Moby Dick" is this specific arrangement of glyphs on paper. But then you look at another edition, or the book in another language, or an ebook edition, and you are totally flummoxed. You will conclude that analyzing Moby Dick as a physical phenomenon is hopeless.

The same is true for consciousness. Analyzing consciousness physically is hopeless, and leads to the hard problem. Because, consciousness is informational. Evidence?

Does consciousness have mass? Does it have a position, or velocity? What material is it made of? None of these seem answerable. In fact, to answer the latter, some want to invent an entirely new substance, with no physical evidence, no evidence at all in fact, other than that consciousness exists, therefore this substance must exist.

On the other hand, what is consciousness, phenomenologically? One thing you can say: each and every conscious moment discloses information. Every of our senses discloses information about the external world, or of our bodies. And every emotion discloses information about our minds.

Consciousness informs, it is informational, not physical. And so to understand it, it must be understood as informational. Only then can we understand how the brain implements it.

Do you think DNA is encoded information, and protein synthesis is an example of information processing? I would ask the same of many other things. Are the electrical signals that arrive at certain parts of the brain carrying information from the retina about a light source?

If you answer Yes to either, how does "You need to first construct an informational narrative" apply? — Patterner

Good follow-up questions, that forced me to clearly think through what I'm trying to say. I would answer 'Yes' to both.

Lets just take DNA for now. When you talk about DNA, your perspective is toward a phenomenon that has already been well explained. This is not where we are at with consciousness.

By the time that there was a search for a molecular mechanism, it was already well understood that the transmission of traits was informational. And, how the logic of genetic recombination functioned was shockingly well understood, all deduced from behavior alone. Here is an illustration of gene crossover, from 1916:



What I was really trying to say, is that for phenomena that are fundamentally informational, there are two sequential questions:

1. How can this phenomenon be understood informationally?
2. How is this informational schema we now understand be instantiated physically?

With DNA, the answer to 1 began with Mendel, and was completed by the time images like the above were made. Crucially, only by answering 1, can 2 be answered. Without answering 1, 2 cannot even be properly posed. This is exactly what we see all the time with consciousness:

1. How can consciousness be instantiated physically?

This is the wrong question. Lacking insight into how consciousness can be realized informationally, we cannot begin to look for that realization physically. We just don't know what we are looking for.

Many people who are leaders in relevant fields - people like Anil Seth, Antonio Damasio, Peter Tse, Brian Greene, Donald Hoffman, and David Eagleman - most of whom think physicalism must be the answer, say we don't have a theory, and don't even have any idea what such a theory would look like. — Patterner

The problem is that consciousness is informational, not physical. Explaining consciousness in physical terms runs into the same problem that explaining any informational process in physical terms does. Imagine starting with the notion of computation, or the notion of War and Peace,
and trying to leap directly to a physical explanation of these. You need to first construct an informational narrative, and only then explain how this narrative is instantiated physically.

Strict omnipotence is not a logically coherent notion. Multiple contradictions follow. One standard one, "can God create a rock so heavy he cannot lift it?" Either he can, and his power is limited in lifting it, or he cannot, and his power is limited in creating it.

You explicitly include a contradictory ability: the ability to create omnipotent beings. You can't have two omnipotent beings. One can always try to strip omnipotence from the other. Either that attempt fails, limiting the power of the first, or it succeeds, limiting the power of the second.

Further, you cannot have two omnipotent and omniscient beings. One can always predict the actions of the other. Either the prediction fails, limiting the omniscience of the first, or it succeeds, limiting the power of the second to act outside of the first's predictions.

So, the rest of your proof is redundant. Your premises are already contradictory.

Moreover, you are arguing with Christian secondary literature, not primary. The idea of God being philosophically perfect, possessing all the "omnis", only arose with the fusion of Christianity and Greek philosophy, really beginning with Augustine.

What criteria do you use to decide if they are normal or not? We're made up of a lot of different parts and behaviors. — Questioner

It depends on what we are talking about. Behavior? Physiology? Ability? Appearance?

What is the purpose of being able to call someone "abnormal?" What is the application of that? — Questioner

To describe. To give context to a description of someone's behavior, physiology, ability, or appearance. Where do these fall within the human spectrum?

To diagnose. Sometimes abnormality indicates a problem that requires correction.

To reward or praise. Where spectrums are value-laden, norms can be exceeded as well as fail to be met.

To exclude. Humans are often excluded based on abnormality, for reasons that are legitimate as well as reasons we would probably object to.

It may lead to suppression or oppression. — Questioner

Indeed, it may. But this belongs in a discussion of the ethics of normality, not the meaning.

This definition requires a judge of what is to be "expected." Who will judge what is to be expected? Who will decide if that fits the definition of "normal?" — Questioner

Of course. That is how the word works. The speaker may have an idea of what "normal" is, the listener may share it, or may not. They talk past each other to the degree that their concepts of "normal" differ. The listener may realize this, or may not have a concept of normal at all, and ask, "What is 'normal' here?"

When we try to apply the concept of "normality" to all human beings - who demonstrate a great deal of variation - the concept kind of breaks down. — Questioner

Why does it break down? Sure they display variation, but this variation is still within pretty tight bands. Human variation is far from pure chaos. There are innumerable patterns that may be used to define normality.

(normalcy) cannot work without marginalizing people who don't fit the parameters of what others "expect." — Questioner

When applied to humans (which is only a fraction of the usage of 'normal'), yes this kind of marginalization happens. What of it? You may think this shouldn't happen; but it does. Maybe we shouldn't use the word with humans at all; but we do.

It is best to describe prescriptive baggage when defining a word, describing how it actually functions.

natural means stemming from nature or following nature's laws. — Copernicus

This definition covers a large chunk of usage, but not all of it.

"Let events follow their natural course". What is "natural" here is not nature's laws, the sentence more likely refers to human events. For events to "follow their natural course" means that they proceed without intervention, where what intervention cons is determined by context. "To rely on your natural ability" mainly means to forego training, not necessarily to forego technological augmentation such as fancy gear or doping.

The most general meaning of "natural" is freedom from intervention, not following natural laws. It is just that human intervention is the sort of intervention often implied when "natural" is used.

what you're describing is natural. — Copernicus

No, @Outlander is describing "normal". Normal is all about expectation. To meet expectation is to be normal .

"Natural" is an entirely different concept. To be "natural" is to be free from influence. "Whose influence?" is context dependent. Usually, but not always, to be natural is to be free from human influence.

This suggests thought is language, words traveling throughout our brain, which is a metaphysical claim, arguing about what the internal thing going on in our head is. That would not be consistent with Wittgenstein, but a better phrasing would be that thinking is shown through use, namely language. — Hanover

Yet, I only paraphrased what you quoted:

"When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought." — PI §329 — Hanover

This points out the problem with ascribing a metaphysical claim to Wittgenstein because here we're now being baited into a conversation about how different people might think. — Hanover

If anyone is "baiting", it is you. Your OP is about the nature of our internal language. Yet now you are demanding all discussion must adhere to some kind of Wittgensteinian ametaphysical purity.

Mentalese is supposed to be pre-linguistic and universal. When you think in your head, that is supposedly a translation from mentalese. And so mentalese, if it is going on, is not necessarily consciously accessible, unlike our verbal thoughts.

I rather agree with Wittgenstein, that language is a vehicle of thought, not a reflection of thoughts happening elsewhere. That said, when I think verbally, I don't think in the compressed manner that you suggest. I think in full sentences. Maybe this just reflects differing cognitive styles. Maybe my dumb brain has to spell everything out. Also remember that verbal thinking is not the only kind of thinking. There is also visual thinking, and other people have claimed more exotic modes (tactile? emotional? logical?).

And so I don't necessarily agree that what is going on in our heads is compression, analogous to how languages compress over time. I wouldn't even call it a language, language is only one component. There is no rigid grammatical requirement for our thoughts to be comprehensible to ourselves.

You do realise, though, that the use of this term 'quale' or 'qualia' is almost entirely unique to a very narrow band of discourse, — Wayfarer

Only if modern analytic discourse on consciousness is a narrow band in its entirety.

allow for the designation of the qualities of conscious experience as a spurious object — Wayfarer

Only grammatically. I don't see the nounification of "objects of consciousness" as carrying any particular ontological commitments.

Like @Banno I don't see how this is deployed against Chalmers, as I recall he makes use of the idea, which predates him by quite a bit.

Should we shoehorn consciousness into a definition, or learn to work with a level of ambiguity? — Banno

What you are describing is not conceptual ambiguity, but rather epistemic ambiguity. We pick and choose our concepts, and I think mine cleanly maps to that which we are talking about when we talk of consciousness. It is an entirely different matter to reliably apply this concept to other beings. Qualia, and therefore consciousness, is private, as third person observers we only have indirect access, through behavior and self report.

Agree that it's very hard to determine what is or isn't sentient at borderline cases such as viruses (presumably not) or jellyfish and so on. — Wayfarer

Viruses are a hard no. They don't even have volition, they make no decisions, they are essentially giant, extraordinarily complex, free floating molecules. Jellyfish seem to be the upper limit of what can be achieved with no central nervous system. Probably not, but as you say it is extremely hard to rule out entirely.

My hunch is that consciousness is the ultimate fulfillment of the engineering principles of modularization and abstraction. It is an extremely efficient strategy for abstracting and organizing information that would otherwise overwhelm the nervous system. We have to integrate all the physical senses, bodily senses, emotions, memories, thoughts. Based on this enormous mass of information, we are supposed to act, moment by moment. If there were no abstraction, if these were all just raw electrical inputs, the brain would be totally overwhelmed. So the brain's strategy is to transform these raw inputs into abstractions, and act based on them. Our lived experience is that of the brain's decision maker. Our world consists in these abstractions, qualia, and from them, we attend to the relevant subset, we predict, and we act.

This strategy has probably coevolved multiple times in different evolutionary branches. To detect consciousness, we would have to understand the principle whereby the brain achieves this kind abstraction, and examine the extraordinarily complex nervous systems of the animals that might be using it.

:lol: I didn't necessarily think I was blowing anyone's doors down! But I don't think I said nothing either.

Just look at all the ways consciousness has been defined in the past. You just said the term was up to us to define. Wayfarer just quoted:

Somewere I once read the aphorism that 'a soul is any being capable of saying "I am"' — Wayfarer

Consciousness has never been a clear, fixed concept. Whereas qualia, your feelings about the term aside, is much more precisely defined. If the unclear term can be defined in terms of the clear term, even seeming tautologously, then that is progress. At least we would know what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness. Does that explain consciousness? Of course not.

Furthermore, I've also noticed that disabled people are portrayed as objects of hate or jokes (in films like "Avatar"). I don't know whether this is truly the norm in society or whether it's a distortion. If this is true, I'd like to point out that the very permissibility of making jokes about people with disabilities was probably perceived differently in earlier times. Furthermore, I think this has become possible due to the secular nature of modern times. — Astorre

There is something going on here, and I'm not at all sure it is cultural. It is not just in films, I noticed growing up that this attitude was very widespread in children. Rather than something that is socialized in us, it is as if this is something that needs to be socialized out of us. This experience made me wonder if there is a dark side to human nature expressing itself here. A drive to exclude based on perceived lack of fitness and lack of ability of the individual to contribute to the group.

One of the gists is that the emergence of organic life is also the emergence of intentional consciousness, even at very rudimentary levels of development. Like, nothing matters to a crystal or a rock formation, but things definitely matter to a bacterium, because it has skin (or a membrane) in the game, so to speak. — Wayfarer

All life has "drives". Viruses have "drives", to infect and reproduce. Roombas have "drives", to clean. This is not enough. What is relevant is whether these drives are experienced as such. We don't just have drives, our drives are sometimes (but crucially, not always) experienced as drives. We have this capacity, this does not remotely mean that to have a drive is intrinsically to experience that drive.

I would like to think that the sentience of beings other than human is not something for us to decide. Whether viruses or archai or plants are sentient may forever remain moot, but that anything we designate with term 'being' is sentient as part of the definition (hence the frequent Buddhist reference to 'all sentient beings'.) — Wayfarer

I thought that 'all sentient beings' was making a distinction between these and insentient beings?

I don't see why it is problematic for us to conceptually mark out what counts as sentience. For me, to be sentient is to have qualitative states. It is quite another thing (maybe impossible) to empirically know whether other species have qualitative states.

.

As if there were one thing that "it is like" to be aware that your toe hurts, to be aware that the sun is out, and to be aware that Paris is in France. — Banno

The second two examples use "aware" in its other sense, which is simply to know a certain fact.

To be aware of a mosquito bite, aware of a sunset, aware of a feeling of jealousy, are all qualitative states. There is something it is like to experience each of these. What each is like is quite different. What unifies them is that they are all varieties of qualitative conscious states, they each have a felt quality. "Qualia" bundles this property of having a felt quality into a conceptual bucket.

And what, exactly, is the claim here? — Banno

The claim is that in order for you to be conscious of anything at all, that consciousness must have a felt quality. Absent that, you aren't actually aware. If something has no felt quality, no associated qualia, then it is not conscious.

"Doesn't the answer simply depend on what we count as being sentient? That is, it's something to be decided , not discovered?"

I would argue that qualia is the bedrock of sentience. To be sentient is to have qualitative states. But given that, it is still something to be discovered, if this is even possible. Unless consciousness is a physical property (which I doubt), we can never build a consciousness detector. The best we can likely do is identify the features of neuroanatomy, across very different species and neural architectures, which bring about consciousness.

There's no third person without the first person. — Wayfarer

I would add, to @Banno's question, that there is no first person without qualia. To be aware of anything at all, there must be something it is like to have that awareness. In other words, consciousness without qualia is contradictory. To do without qualia is to do without consciousness.

Probably not all that different. I think there really is a hard problem, and it is hard because of the relation between us and our own consciousness, vs. us and anything else we experience. All of our collective evolutionary and cultural problem solving machinery was developed to manage the latter. Whereas with the former we really only have our own example, and none of that machinery applies. Worse, All of that machinery is reflexively part of what needs to be explained, insofar as it structures our conscious experience. That is what makes it so hard.

. That said, there is no 'hard problem of consciousness' at all. The whole reason for Chalmer's polemic is to show up an inevitable shortcoming of third-person science. Once that is grasped, the 'problem' dissappears. But it seems extraordinarily difficult to do! — Wayfarer

I have a somewhat different take. Consciousness is real, and in principle it admits to explanation. The problem is our unique epistemic relationship with our own consciousness. Our whole access to the world, and to ourselves, is via consciousness. And so we have the problem of explaining consciousness from the inside.

It is like someone who lives alone wearing rose colored glasses, who can never remove them or even look at them, tasked with explaining the glasses that filter their vision.

Consciousness, which can experience so much, and explain these experiences so well, has a unique difficulty explaining itself.

SO you are at odds with those who have said elsewhere that qualia are just colours and so on. Because colours are not restricted to the first person... — Banno

Yes, that is exactly why we need the term, to specify we are talking about the first person aspect specifically.

And it seems to me that one simple explanation of this is that the notion is incoherent. — Banno

A very easy, simple recourse to incomprehension.

You have omitted qualia already. The word does no work in your explanation. The explanation works without mention of qualia. — Banno

A smell is a quale. You are free to be allergic to the word and never use it. And you are free to invent a world where qualia are just decor that don't do anything, or are incoherent, or don't exist. You are free to be wrong.

You seem very confident about that. Fine. To me they are instances of the same sort of thing, — Banno

I'm confident. There is more than a trivial distinction between meeting an old friend whose name you cannot place, and meeting a stranger.

There are three very distinct things: smell, recognition, naming.

But you want to add, in addition to the smell of coffee, something more: the quale of coffee, here, now, perhaps. Something of that sort. And the simple request is, why?. To what end? — Banno

No, I never said anything like this, and I keep feeling you are somehow missing the concept. The quale is not something in addition to the smell. The smell is an instance of a broader category, qualia, that includes everything with a subjective feel.

. The raw sensation by itself doesn’t explain why you identify it as "coffee." Therefore, "qualia" does no explanatory work in the theory of perception or cognition. It’s a label, not a mechanism. — Banno

In your mind, linguistic context somehow explains it? I don't think so.

It is really a very simple story. In your life you encounter aromatic things. In their presence, you experience a kind of qualia: a smell. In your mind, you form an association: smell <--> aromatic thing. In this case, coffee smell <--> coffee. Then later on, when you encounter coffee smell, your training tells you it's significance: coffee.

You cannot omit qualia from this story. Qualia, that which is a subjective feel, is how information such as aromas enter into our conscious awareness. Without qualia, it isn't clear how the information would enter into awareness at all. Maybe if we were some kind of hyper linguistic species, a voice would whisper in our ear: "coffee is near". But we are humans, and so our brains use qualia for this job.

How does linguistic context do a better job of explaining this?

What a grand vision! Compounding error with illusion. Rhetoric dressed as precision. — Banno

Lol, and here I thought it was just a definition.

A trivial distinction. To not recognise the smell is to not be able to place it, especially in terms of language. — Banno

Not recognizing something and forgetting the word for something are entirely different. You can know what a smell is, what produces it, while the name of what produces it might be elusive. Or you may know the smell is familiar, but have no clue what it is. Or, you may have never encountered the smell before at all.

Are we really arguing this?

It's unclear to me what this is claiming. Are you now saying that anger and imaginings are also qualia? Odd. Perhaps the next question is, what for you isn't a quale? — Banno

Yes. This is really standard, and it is odd to me that you have read papers on qualia, hosted topics on qualia, opine frequently on qualia, without even knowing that. Qualia applies to anything that has a felt, subjective character. "Qualia" specifically picks out only that felt, subjective character, discarding everything else. There is no suitable word that can be used in it's place.

Look again, with care. That is precisely what it does allow for - the smell is recognised, but the matching word is not: — Banno

No, forgetting the word is a different case. I'm talking about the case where the smell is not recognized.

Then is it anything other than what is commonly called a "sensation"? If not, let us use that term rather than invent a new one. It will suffice. — Banno

"Sensation " is not good enough. It is almost completely specialized to bodily feelings. "Red sensation", "oboe sensation", "angry sensation", "imagining a green sensation". are awkwardly disconnected from established usage.

It is clear in the text that the owner can look inside the box. — Banno

no one can look inside the box. — Banno

If you want phenomenology, there is no gap between my smelling that and my smelling coffee. That's the point. What there might be is a gap between my smelling coffee and my choosing the word "coffee" for what I smell. — Banno

This is demonstrably untrue. It doesn't allow for the common case where you smell something but cannot recall what it is. Despite not recalling, there is still something it is like to smell it. For this to be possible, there must be a difference between smelling something and identifying it, even if the identification is not always conscious.

...and that's the very question I asked, way, way back. If qual are just smells and colours, why bother? Why not just talk about smells and colours? — Banno

So are qualia redundant? Incoherent? Or non-existent? Which is it, you have claimed each of these at various times.

Qualia is a generic term for the individual, subjective experience of smells and colors, and anything else we experience. Invented, I suppose, because "experiences" and "sensations" are already too overloaded. Whereas, "smells" and "colors" can equally refer to the properties engendering these experiences.

no one can look inside the box. — Banno

This does not respect the structure of qualia. The owner of the box may look inside, but no one else. Moreover, the box is not disconnected from the world. There is perhaps a global beetle, and everyone's personal beetle is, though a network of cameras, an image which is a perspective on that global beetle.

it is unlikely that there is a table of any sort in your brain. More likely that there are neural paths that activate when there is coffee in the air. — Banno

Certainly. "Table look up" is at best a logical description of the operation, but not faithful to the actual mechanics.

Yep. But the qual plays no role. You want an explanation that goes odour→qual→table →coffee when one that goes odour→coffee will suffice. — Banno

"Odor" is supposed to be the molecules here? Sorry, but the gap is far too great. How do you get from odor to coffee?

Yep. Same for smell, which unlike a qual has temporal continuity. That is, your qualia become smells in order to be of any use. — Banno

What is a smell if not a quale?

Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless? If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. a No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. — §293

I still don't know how the"game" functions without the "beetle". Specifically, how you are able to accurately utter "l smell coffee" without the involvement of qualia.

So you have a qual, and you run down a table of qualia and match it to the qual you previously identified as "coffee". — Banno

Perhaps this suffices to describe what my brain does. I'm not generally aware, unless I'm struggling to identify an odor.

I just smell coffee. — Banno

That is a statement of what you do. It explains nothing.

Suppose that your qual for coffee changes over time, and your table of qualia also changes to match. You still run down the table to identify the smell, but it is a completely different smell.

What role did your qual play here? — Banno

The qualia I experience still matches my "table", even in the implausible scenario both are drifting.

Qualia are supposed to explain how we recognize things, but the recognition depends on stability, which qualia, as momentary sensations, cannot guarantee. — Banno

While qualia themselves are momentary, the cognitive machinery which produces them must be stable enough to allow for recognition through time.


Again, please explain how you identify the aroma of coffee without qualia.

Where do we make use of qualia - outside of philosophy fora? — Banno

For instance, I make use of qualia when I identify the smell of coffee. If I didn't recognize that particular subjective olfactory experience as coffee, I couldn't make the identification. That there is coffee in the air is revealed to me by the quale of coffee aroma.

I believe most humans, including neuroscientists, agree with me here. Does your brain somehow work otherwise?

Your qual change over time but you do not notice, yet the language game continues unchanged. Therefore the qual are irrelevant to the language game. — Banno

The quale can change, but memories must as well. This does not imply that qualia are irrelevant. What is required is the qualia are stable with respect to memories of them.

It is true that given a radically different cognitive architecture that does not make use of qualia, they would be irrelevant. But the fact is, we do make use of them. Given our cognitive makeup, without stable qualia (at minimum, stable relative to memory), we could never coordinate our experiences. It is on you to describe how we can agree that the aroma of coffee is in the air without them.

If the private-symbol model requires “lockstep drifting qualia” just to keep meaning afloat, then abandon the model. Meaning doesn’t live there anyway. — Banno

Wait what? Drifting qualia is your idea, not mine. I'm pointing out how implausible it would be for memories and qualia to drift in lockstep without our notice.

On the presumption that there is such a thing as "the correct subjective smell", which is the very point at issue. — Banno

You identify the smell as just another version of the chemical. This seems to imply that there is a correct subjective smell, which is absurd.

What I mean is, why is the form it's in not the form that it can most easily process and act upon? — Patterner

As the brain receives a sensory signal, it is just a signal, presumably without any qualitative content. The brain has to do the work so that the signal can be interpreted by (the conscious subset of) itself as qualitative.

The key insight is that the sensory manifold we experience is not accidental or epiphenomenal. It is a highly efficient way of organizing information that would otherwise overwhelm the nervous system.

Notice how the sensation has now become a symbol. — Banno

Not a new position. The smells are symbols. Smells exhibit the characteristic one way relation of symbols. The smell points to the event, brewing coffee, but you can analyze the coffee for a thousand years and you will never derive the smell.

Note that any suitable medium can function as symbols: roads use signage, books use glyphs, brains use qualia.

Suppose that your qual of coffee changes over time, but you do not notice; so that the way coffee smells for you now is utterly different to how it smelt to you as a child.

Now, what is it that is the same now as it was when you were a child? Well, it's not the qual, since that has changed. It's the language and behaviour around the smell of coffee that has stayed the same

The system functions entirely without the consistent private symbol. It is not required. — Banno

This does not follow.

It is theoretically possible that all of our private symbols vary over our lifetimes without our noticing. But for this to work, our memories have to vary in lockstep. If they do not, then not only would we notice, but the symbols would become useless. If what we remember as coffee yesterday smells like bacon today, then the symbol does not communicate anything.

It is as if you are arguing words are not required for language to function, because theoretically words might be varying without our noticing (along with our memories and all printed text).

Or, my preference, the smell of coffee just is those chemicals, under a different description. — Banno

This is very wrong. The smell is certainly not the chemical. This feels like naive realism.

If the smell were the chemical, an alien could analyze the chemical and derive the correct subjective smell. This is clearly impossible. The smell is not a chemical property. Smells are the end product of the conjunction of the chemical and the human sensory system.

Have we? Or have we co-ordinated our behaviour? — Banno

Both. We coordinated on the basis of internal sensations. That is part of the mechanism. Lacking this, you might say "I smell coffee", I might say "I smell bacon", one would be as groundless as the next.

What more, exactly, is there to "identifying my internal, private sensation as coffee" than is found in "I smell coffee" — Banno

Nothing. One just makes explicit what is already contained in the other.

Discourse functions even if our sensations differ... so what is the place of the sensation? — Banno

Since sensations are private, there is no need for them to be consistent between people. They only have to be consistent within an individual. Smell sensations are like a private, internal symbol table. We learn by consistently matching a public event, coffee brewing, with a private symbol, the smell of coffee. Then, when we later encounter the private symbol, the smell of coffee, we can infer the public event, coffee is brewing, is nearby.

How can this system function without the private symbol? And so how would smell discourse function without the system?

But I'm not seeing how a discreet internal event isn't as problematic as a "thing"; it remains that no one else can check that you are correct. — Banno

If you claim you smell coffee, I cannot look inside your head to verify. But I can attend to my sense of smell: do I experience the internal sensation I have leaned to associate with coffee, or don't I? I do. i can confuse that you are experiencing the same smell that I am. Or more sophisticated, that both of us are experiencing the internal event we associate with coffee (even if these are different).

That these sensations off coffee may be entirely different between us is ultimately only of philosophical significance, the discourse functions the same either way. But without these sensations, the discourse wouldn't happen at all.

That everyday discourse functions without the philosophical notion of qualia is not under dispute. But what relevance is that to us purported philosophers?