You're saying that what ontology is about, what it's addressing, somehow hinges on the conventional language used in the ontological arguments we make? — Terrapin Station

I'm saying that your ability to make an identity claim of consciousness to brain states is based on ontological talk. But I'm criticizing that on the grounds of a category error. Obviously, reality doesn't care what we say about it.

If you're talking about different conventional ways to talk about things, surely you're not suggesting that ontology (or more importantly what ontology is about) in some way hinges on how people normally talk about things, are you? — Terrapin Station

I'm saying our making ontological arguments does.

The problem is that it's not a category error. The mistake is thinking that they're "two different domains." — Terrapin Station

They're not conceptually the same sort of "things" at all. On the one hand you have abstracted, objective descriptions, and on the other, you have experiences.

"bad analysis of what explanations are and what they can and can't do in the first place" — Terrapin Station

Maybe, but then we're still stuck with the limits of what physicalism can explain, and not being able to say whether some physical system different from our biology is conscious.

Does consciousness = Awareness ?
- Does consciousness = Attention ? — Basko

No, because both of those can be defined functionally and performed by a machine. It leaves out the subjective experiences.

- Does consciousness = Both ? or Something else ? — Basko

Subjectivity, qualia, what it's like, color, pain, imagination, etc.

The "hard problem" arises due to a combination of (a) a bias against seeing mentality as something physical and (b) — Terrapin Station

The problem is that identifying the mental with the physical is a category error, since they are are two different domains. And it doesn't explain why there would be an identify for some brain states and not others, nor does it tell us whether other physical systems different from our own would be conscious.

The domain of mental is: belief, desire, pleasure, cold, taste, color, sound, emotion, dreams, hallucinations, etc.

The domain of the physical is: physics, chemistry, biology, function, structure, brain states, etc.

So, it doesn't mean the universe doesn't exist when there are no observers, but the only universe we will ever know is that revealed in and by human experience. The error is to forget that, and to 'absolutize' scientific knowledge, as if it exists quite independently of humans. Basically that means, treating humans as objects, and leaving out the subjective nature of experience (and therefore reality). And we're all so embedded in that, that it is second nature to us. — Wayfarer

The alternative to this is to suppose there is a structure to reality that human beings come to know about imperfectly. First through everyday experience and cognitizing that in whatever primitive fashion. And then later using the tools of logic, math and science.

The subjective nature of experience is how we experience the world as upright walking apes, but we can still kind of understand the structure of reality, even though it has taken a lot of trial and error.

Isn't this fundamentally what the debate over realism amounts to? Whether there is a structure to the world we can know about, or whether the mind imposes that structure?

The question is: How is Neural Activity Mapped to the Conscious Experience? There is a huge Explanatory Gap involved in any kind of Mapping or measurement of Neural Correlates. — SteveKlinko

There is, but better mapping/measurements could lead us to clues and reduce the explanatory gap. Assuming this is impossible is assuming that our a priori arguments for the hard problem are bullet proof. And history isn't kind to that sort of certainty.

If we found out that Big Bangs are really the start of a new simulation, and that is the natural way all universes begin, with no beginning and no end, then that would be "reality", not "simulations". — Harry Hindu

That's true. But what if the big bangs generated Boltzman brains?

This also raises the question of whether or not the simulations that we create in our computers are real universes where the NPCs are really conscious themselves. — Harry Hindu

Right, that would be a way to rule out being inside a simulation. But it's a question we can't answer with any confidence.

It's vats all the way down.

But yes, that's the skeptical worry. Nick Bostrom wrote that realism would be a casualty of future tech when simulations are indistinguishable from the inside. And then of course he also argued that we're likely inside an ancestor simulation.

Did you ever watch the movies eXistenZ or the Thirteenth Floor? They had multiple levels of simulation. eXistenZ ends with the main characters and the audience being unsure of whether they were in base reality or still inside a game. Same with Inception, but that was a dream skepticism scenario instead of a simulation.

And there's the Star Trek episode where the crew turns the table on the sentient Holodeck character Moriarty, transporting him to a cube that would simulate a lifetime of adventure off the holodeck, tricking Moriarty into thinking he had escaped into the real world. And then Picard raises the possibility that universe itself might be a simulation.

We're left either conceding these worries have some merit (non-zero probability of being true), or denying the possibility of such scenarios. I think denial is a really strong claim since nobody has the knowledge to say whether it's impossible to envatt or simulate to that degree.

So was Augustine puzzled by the meaning of the word, or what time was?

While my complete sympathy for the birds, the bird-huggers forget that nature is more than capable and is doing the job of replacing the birds going missing in flight tours. — god must be atheist

Nature adapts, which means the generalist species that do well alongside humans and can live in a range of climates have the advantage and are likely to fill the niches leftover from the specialists who can't adapt in the future.

Just think of the possibilities! If this lead to cell regeneration, then maybe one day we could recycle pigs to slaughter and eat over and over again. — S

Oh god! That gives me an idea for a horror story where aliens with a taste for human flesh recycle our brains into cloned bodies over and over.

think they were being overly optimistic that consciousness would likely occur simply by stimulating some neurons in a very different environment. — Terrapin Station

We really don't know, but it's quite possible you could end up with a nightmarish, insane experience on the part of the subject. Maybe the brain experiences intense pain with all the signals from the body missing. Or maybe intense fear and confusion. Likely there would be crazy hallucinations if the subject did regain consciousness. Perhaps intense seizures would occur.

Or it could just be fragmentary stuff. We don't know how a brain functions absent a body if it's kept alive.

In the context of the discussion, I want to say: yes he does. He knows what time is. As we all do. But he's missing the additional skill of being able to say what it's meaning is, which requires more knowledge, something extra. — StreetlightX

Do we, though? We know the experience of time passing. But it took until Einstein before time was known as part of the four spacetime dimensions. And it took a knowledge of entropy and cosmology to understand f the arrow of time (somewhat). There's a possibility that we live in a frozen block universe where all points in time exist, and the passage of time is just an experience our brains create.

I think sushi is right about the fear part, but not on the part of what we fear. In my opinion it's not failure we fear, but more, horrendously extensive, all-stupefying boredom. We are lazy because the things we don't do bore us... — god must be atheist

I don't recall ever being afraid of boredom. I just dislike the tendency to reduce complex human behavior and emotions to a couple basic ones.

Yeah, compare the treatment of cats to raccoons. Raccoons are evil and should be shot, but god forbid if someone mentions killing off the stray cats because they're having a negative effect on the native bird population.

Laziness is fear of failure; the fear of not living up to one’s perception of self. It’s cowardice in disguise. — I like sushi

I strongly disagree with this in general. Often times, I just don't feel like doing whatever it is I should be doing or could be doing, not because I have fear, but because I'd rather screw around or watch Netflix, or even post here than put in the effort. And this is what I observe with other people and what they say a majority of the time. Sometimes, it can be true that you put off doing something because of fear, and maybe that can manifest as laziness. But not most of the time for a majority of people.

I think it's just the animal in us that prefers laying around or goofing off. Chimps spend a surprising amount of time doing very little. Maybe it's society that makes us feel like we should be more productive.

and were slaughtered in ways compatible with how a pig wants to exit. — god must be atheist

There's a way pigs wish to be slaughtered?

I'm all for happy pigs. Not sure what it is with horses and dogs getting the gold treatment, and pigs are cattle at best.

I meant literally? — bongo fury

What other way would it be? Figurative pain? Metaphorical pleasure? Abstract taste? Well, maybe that one for some people. Non-literal feelings?

I dream of platonic reds and functional sounds.

Is this a language can't express everything? More of a Witty what we can't speak of we must pass over in a silence, and the beetle in the box isn't a something but not nothing either? Also, it's not the things in the world that are mysterious, but the world itself.

Or to paraphrase that last thing in terms of your post, it's the essence of things themselves that we can't get at it and remains unspeakable.

Therefore this empiricist is likely to reject your question as meaningless and inapplicable in the first-person. — sime

The OP was referring to one neuroscientist's approach to explaining consciousness, or at least providing more detailed correlation. My question would be the hard problem, I take it. That problem comes about because of the expectation that science can provide an explanatory framework for everything.

Consciousness has nothing to do with brains. — bert1

So if we replaced your brain with sawdust, you'd still be conscious?

We don't dream that way (as far as I know) because "other people who have minds of their own" is such a basic, never-violated rule of reality. We don't observe, meet, or interact with our own imagined characters in the real world. — Bitter Crank

It would be wild if you dreamed of someone arguing with you that solipsism is true and they were the only mind in the world.

On a related note, I was reminded of the author Robert Louis Stevenson, who used his dream people as a source of stories. He called them the "little people who manage man's internal theater". Apparently women have a different dream management.

Is it the skepticism about mental pictures / symbols in the brain? Do you need them in your intuition of consciousness or perception? — bongo fury

I just have them along with pains, sounds, tastes, thoughts, etc.

An altogether terrifying prospect. This seems to imply that the real universe is different to the one that exists inside our heads. — Mark Dennis

But we already knew this was the case, at the very least because our senses are limited, and many things we only learned about the world after we had the technology to perform experiments and gather data to tell us how the universe was different.

Idealist philosophers aren't saying that anything you think is correct, just because you think it. If they were as naive as you depict them to be, then there would be nothing to discuss! — Wayfarer

Right, but it's a question of why we need to have certain experiences. It's like saying that if we're inside a simulation, what's the point of all the suffering? Why didn't the machines make a Utopia?

Oh wait, they did and the humans kept waking themselves up, because they couldn't accept a pleasant world.

The bent stick can be called an illusion, therefore, because that sensation is not coherently and regularly connected to the others. If we pull the stick out of the water, or we reach down and touch the stick, we will get a sensation of a straight stick. It is this coherent pattern of sensations that makes the stick. If we judge that the stick is bent, therefore, then we have made the wrong judgement, because we have judged incorrectly about what sensation we will have when we touch the stick or when we remove it from the water.

But that raises the question of why there would be sensations of illusion if there are just experiences. We can give a good material explanation for the bent stick appearance, but the idealist one just has an appearance of refracted light for some reason.

The bent stick isn't the best example though as the idealist would probably say those optical experiences are what's need to construct a visual world. So what about disease and microbes? If our body is just a series of experiences, why should be getting sick from invisible microbes or cancers, that we've only learned to see in past couple centuries?

Why is it necessary that we should have bodily experiences of sickness and aging?

Lovely story but I'm not sure that it teaches us anything we didn't know already.
A child learns to speak by imitation. Echoing. Parroting. — Amity

But how does that get turned into understanding? After-all, neither a [arrot nor current AI can make that transition. What is about human children that imitation leads to them learning how to use words?

so I'm not sure what's all that new here. — StreetlightX

The inferential part about perception where the brain is guessing at what the sensory inputs will be is different than what people arguing philosophy say perception is, and the idea that you could arrange experiments to help map that indirect computation onto experience might possibly lead to discovering a causal link, instead of just supposing that argument has determined a priori that such a thing can't exist.

Of course the arrow goes both ways as the brain updates it's guessing with new inputs it receives as it tells the body to move about. Maybe this view of perception would find some agreement from the Kantians, with the inference mechanism being part of to categorizing the sensory manifold.

Are you a philosophical zombie? Because you argue as if you have no conscious experiences. If I ask whether you experience pain, are you going to give me some functional/physiological response?

ell, it's akin to asking why any physical stuff has just the properties it does. — Terrapin Station

Imagine though if atoms had a special property only under certain situations, and we couldn't give a scientific reason for that.

Anyway, nobody has jumped on the inferential view of perception yet. Perhaps I should have made the thread about that instead of another hard problem one.

All of this is true of our situation as we perceive it but says nothing about any purported "reality" above and beyond our perceptions. You can go around in circles about this issue forever, but you are never going to know anything which is beyond our capacity to know, and the question about how things are in themselves is the paradigmatic example of a question that we cannot even coherently formulate. let alone find an answer to. — Janus

This would seem to put us into the same position as a brain in the vat. Meillassoux's anti-correlationist argument is similar to Putnam's argument that a brain that's always been envatted could not truthfully say it was envatted, because it couldn't mean that in the way the brain would actually be envatted.

Correlationism locks us in from truthfully saying dinosuars existed. We can say both, but we can't mean them truthfully. We can only mean them in a correlationist or envatted sense, which would be false.

Thus correlationism denies the truth of evolution. It can appear that we evolved, and it can be pragmatic to say we did, but it cannot be true.

Exactly, and sometimes it seems like that's what critics are demanding. — Terrapin Station

That is something to take into account, but it's also because we can't say why any brain process would have a conscious correlate other than some just do. Which then limits us epistemologically from knowing about other animals, machines and aliens.

The man in theChinese room does understand something - the rules for returning certain scribbles when given certain scribbles. If the scribbles have another meaning then that just means you need to provide the rules for using the scribbles with the different meaning. — Harry Hindu

But that won't past muster with language as use version of meaning, since rule following for translating language is not the same thing as use of words in language games.

The horse has been out of the barn since civilization started. Most of human history was groups of a couple hundred people in tribes. So you might argue that is what we evolved for, however it's kind of hard to walk that back when you have nearly 8 billion and thousands of years of culture based on civilization.

GB is still millions of people comprised of different cultures and ethnicities, and its still part of global markets and politics where its people have access to global telecommunications.

I agree with correlationism. The dinosaur argument undermines it? — frank

Geology and cosmology even more so. The fact that science says we evolved and depend on mindless processes to be here is good reason for thinking correlationism is somewhat misleading. Even the fact of your birth accomplishes that, although Meillassoux focused on death and the world after humans are extinct.

In other words, we form a picture of 'mind' here and 'object' there, and wonder what the relationship is between the two. But there are not two, there is the 'perceiving of the object.' — Wayfarer

Yeah, but there is a brain here and an object over there. Our perception of the object happens inside our skulls, while the object remains outside. Unless it's ingested, then some of it might get into the brain.

especially because they'll give no clear criteria for what fhey require of explanations. — Terrapin Station

That raises the question of whether the explanatory gap lies with the limitations of explanation. Does an explanation have to cause you to experience the transition from explanation to experience?

I'm not even sure what I'm saying here, but part of the problem with not knowing what it's like to be a bat is that no description is going to put you into the state of having a sonar experience. At least, I can't see how it would.

Descental spirit. Not ancestral. Otherwise, correct. — god must be atheist

Well, the primitive human view of time travel is such that they call it "ancestral", since you're from an alternate timeline, and therefore cannot be their descendant, particularly after you convince them to use birth control.

Haha!

That raises question of how does the Chinese Room manage to perform perfect translations. Can that be done by mere rule following?

Then again, doesn't a language game involve rule following?

That's a good point. I guess our great-great-great-great grandparents could have just abstained? But that would have increased their own suffering.