What would it mean to say that aspects of experience are illusory? Just that they are not what we think they are, no? Are we liable to think of them as substantive? — Janus

That is the question. It seems most of us agree there are conscious experiences which include colors, sounds, pains, etc. But what does that amount to? We can reject qualia talk, but we're still left with the conscious sensations, which are not easily accounted for by some objective account.

If everything is just a symbol, what are they symbols for? — Banno

The mirror stage in a capitalistic society?

Idealism. — Banno

The self as a bundle of mirrored symbols?

Red, like pain and bitter, is experienced. You can't communicate that to someone who has never had that experience. At best you can tell them there are such experiences, but they won't know what it's like until they experience it themselves.

Unobservables aren't experienced. But they can be described. That's why we don't have words for sonar sensations, but we do for sonar.

here are names and descriptions for and/or of unobservables. — creativesoul

Those unobservables aren't red, nor do they communicate redness.

Personally I would rather obliterate any and all philosophical notions that lead to widespread confusion and false belief given the sheer power that belief wields in this shared world of ours. — creativesoul

If only you could get everyone else to agree with you.

Part of the Cartesian error is to categorize unlike things together based on superficial similarities instead of making natural and functional distinctions. So visualizing, dreaming, imagining, hallucinating, etc., are considered by the Cartesian to be a kind of seeing and perception, when they are not. — Andrew M

But they are kinds of conscious experiences. And the thing about them is you can't just dismiss dreams, hallucinations, etc. as properties in relation to the objects being perceived, since there are no objects, and thus no such relations. But there are still experiences.

I dream of a red apple, and that red apple is a visual experience.

Ok, I’l bite... And the conclusion is? — Olivier5

There's no knowledge problem. Thing is, the person (or robot) has to put themselves into the right state in order to gain that knowledge, which means that if they can't, they won't know what it's like. So I don't think Dennett's counter thought experiment does the trick.

reply="Olivier5;475231"] Well, he uses the robot version of Mary to counter the knowledge argument because Robo-Mary can learn how to modify their code or circuits to put themselves into the state of seeing red directly. Which presumably human Mary could do with brain surgery or a transcranial magnet.

However, this won't work with bat sonar. So Mary still doesn't know what it's like to be a bat. But it does get at the issue which is propositional knowledge cannot communicate a kind of experience a person has never had.

[ That's why Dennett is less sexist. He uses a robotic female instead.

I cannot read your mind and you cannot read mine. — Olivier5

Hasn't stopped some scientists from publishing papers about the political and moral persuasions of people linked to various brain scans. I'm guessing those are not much better than lie detectors.

A bat brain in a vat, I like. Cat in a box is a whole different other can of quantum worms. Why can't nuns be color scientists? (I suppose a female would never have come up with such a biased thought experiment on account of biological reality).

Have your read Dennett's paper about Robo-Mary?

A robot, a dead man and a blindsighted nun are lying next to you on a sunny beach. Describe the different effects of the sunlight on each of them. Do not write on both sides of the paper at once. Your time starts...now. — Daemon

Add a man day dreaming and another one meditating. Since there is apparently no such thing as inner phenomena, no cartesian theater, it should be easy to figure out who is experiencing what. It's all public, right? All out there in the world to empirically verify.

I think I shall start investing in lie detector tests and brain scans.

.as Davidson said

In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. — Banno

Like unmediated touch with the molecular motion or infrared light when we feel temperature, eh? The motion of molecules and the photons in the infrared range are given to us directly in experience when we feel warm or cold. That's how that works?

Every now and then, as with the bent-stick-in-water example, things aren't always as they seem. So that becomes a point of difference that can be investigated further. — Andrew M

Or like when someone hears voices and sees things the rest of us don't.

So how does this model deal with disagreements about what is perceived? Via norms that function much like the standard meter length bar that used to be held in Paris. If you want to check whether the apple is red, find a normally-sighted person and ask them. — Andrew M

Like that blue/gold dress?

There is currently no consensus on why the dress elicits such discordant colour perceptions among viewers[, 31] though these have been confirmed and characterized in controlled experiments (described below). No synthetic stimuli have been constructed that are able to replicate the effect as clearly as the original image.

Neuroscientists Bevil Conway and Jay Neitz believe that the differences in opinions are a result of how the human brain perceives colour, and chromatic adaptation. Conway believes that it has a connection to how the brain processes the various hues of a daylight sky: "Your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis... people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black."[32][33] Neitz said:

Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance... but I've studied individual differences in colour vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I've ever seen.[32] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#Scientific_explanations

Now Marchesk offered this as a reply to my 'the meaning of "red" cannot be the experience it points to'. — Banno

Well, this was meant to cover cases where people do not have the exact same experience, but they can still communicate about the same object.

But let’s say we never evolved eyes. In that case, red would have no meaning, even when we discovered light and that some creatures navigated by sight. It would be colorless like the rest of the EM spectrum to us.

Similarly, sonar or detecting magnetic fields might have some rich experience we have no words for, because we lack those sensory modalities.

Visual perception of red apples does not guarantee conscious experience of red apples — creativesoul

Or at least the process all the way up to focus/attention, assuming normal neurological functioning.

Correlated at least.

Correct. If we wanted to design a conscious robot, we wouldn’t know how to do it.

Yes. Notice that the process need not result in conscious awareness if we’re paying attention to something else. Such as daydreaming while driving on the highway.

Reflective surfaces, photons, eyes, nerves, brain for vision.

The process does. Notice that a description of the process does not include the experience. It ends at neurons firing.

Hence, the meaning of "red" cannot be the experience it points to. — Banno

But it can be the thing that produces an experience in us. Which would be the visual perception of an apple.

There is no part of your brain which shows you a colour, it cannot happen, brains are made up of neurons, not colours — Isaac

Where oh where does the color come from?

Why the third, that in addition to there being an apple and there being it's taste, there is also 'the way' it tastes? — Isaac

The taste is the way it tastes. It’s a conscious sensation. Stating what it’s like is just to point that out.

It’s like when you’re listening to a boring lecture, and you start thinking of other things. Your conscious experience of the talk goes in and out. Maybe you hear every other sentence.

An apple tastes precisely and exactly just like an apple... to all apple eaters. That's how... — creativesoul

Owing to the "circumstances, conditions or dispositions," the same objects appear different. The same temperature, as established by instrument, feels very different after an extended period of cold winter weather (it feels warm) than after mild weather in the autumn (it feels cold). Time appears slow when young and fast as aging proceeds. Honey tastes sweet to most but bitter to someone with jaundice. A person with influenza will feel cold and shiver even though she is hot with a fever. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhonism#The_ten_modes_of_Aenesidemus

The apple isn't always going to taste the same to everyone. It won't always taste the same to you, depending on your "circumstances, conditions or dispositions".

ou know, it's like the taste of beer; there's no experience of the taste of beer since the taste of beer is the experience, and to say that there is an experience of the taste of beer is like saying there is an experience of the experience. So how much less is there a quality of the experience of the taste of beer? — Janus

No, it's just noting that there is a conscious experience to tasting beer, and this taste is not in the beer itself, but rather the taster.

What does "qualia" pick out to the exclusion of all else? — creativesoul

Conscious experience.

But you're Australian??? You don't know what Thanksgiving turkey is like!

Would that be a direct sort of pain in your behind?

Not in America.

Either you can explain what you're referring to when you use "conscious sensations" or you cannot. — creativesoul

The colors you see, the pains you feel. I thought that was clear.

What conscious sensations? — creativesoul

The one's you're aware of.

The answer poses a puzzle.

You don't shiver conscious sensations?

Colors and sounds are empty notions?

Would you consider this a form of emergentism?

I prefer my woo to be shivered in a more supervenient fashion than the microphysical.