Yes, but could B&W Mary know what yellow looks like before seeing it?

(I simply can't resist) Could she shiver the yellow empirically in her room?

Woo tech putting the sound quivers into her brain.

I don't know how to evaluate that. Why do you think it's the superposition of all the cells that results in consciousness? I think Jaron Lanier did suggest something along those lines.

It would be wicked cool if we could tie quantum weirdness to consciousness, but color me a little skeptical.

Quantum Brain Shivers

Colors ain't coming from out there. Some brain shivering is going on.

Shivers in my mind
I am searching for your qualia
Everything shivers
In gray matter

@Andrew M@Banno@creativesoul@Janus

What is it like to have synesthesia? Some people will see number symbols and letters shaded or tinged with color. The shadings are not the same across individuals, although there are some commonalities. For some reason, "A" is often seen as red. There's lots of other interesting types of synesthesia.

The reason for bringing this up is because those people will experience some things differently than the rest of us. Seeing black "A" as red tinged or shaded is surprising, because a black symbol is not reflecting red light. So where does the red come from?

A term that explains why from your vantage point it appears that my brain is shivering and from my vantage point it appears that the world is shivering colors and shapes and sounds, etc. — Harry Hindu

I propose "shivering qualia". This is a harder problem, because one cannot just quine the shivering away. Actually, I kind of like the term "shivering" now.

I believe the qualia-phobes think our brains are not shivering hard enough when it comes to consciousness, thus our belief in color woo. We can tell that Dennett's brain shivers particularly hard, because of his zombie views.

This is nothing more than the usual -of-the-gaps argument: If science were capable of explaining consciousness, it would have already (impossibility of future scientific discovery); Science has not already explained consciousness; Therefore science cannot explain consciousness (and therefore consciousness is magic). — Kenosha Kid

It's not a god-of-the-gaps argument if the difficulty is conceptual. It's more of either something is wrong with physicalism or something is wrong with consciousness. The reason for this could be epistemological, or it could be ontological.

How do the colors, sounds, feels, etc come from the color-less, soundless, feel-less matter? We know about the matter because we experience it with colors, sounds, feels, etc. but our scientific understanding is a necessary abstraction from the particulars of our human experience. So either our abstract understanding is leaving something out, or our particular experiences is not what we think it is. Or there is some way to derive the particulars from the abstract.

Or one can go off in a different metaphysical direction and avoid the hard problem in favor of other difficulties. Philosophy demands some bullet-biting sacrifice from all of us.

Quining illusory brain shivers, and how hard brain shivers give us direct access to darkness.

Chalmers goes into detail about this, but life can be explained fully in terms of structure and function, but consciousness is different, because our sensations are not the properties of structure and function. It's like saying that color just emerges from neuronal activity. Okay, but how and what does that mean? Is it spooky emergence?

I don't think it's that simple. I have yet to see a satisfying explanation for the conscious sensations of color, sound, etc. Sure, one can change the philosophical assumptions which lead to the hard problem. Like by rejecting physicalism, embracing Kantianism, panpsychism, Wittgenstein or whatever. But those all have their own issues.

I do think many other animals have conscious experiences. I don't know whether our talk and introspection is what makes it seem like a hard problem. It's one possibility to explore. I'm a bit unclear as to the implications.

Oh you're right, I did copy the wrong link. I had both open.

Instead, it seems to me that we experience the world, which includes sunsets and red apples and human beings. And those are the things that we seek to explain. — Andrew M

Sunsets and red apples are experienced a particular way because we're human. The physiology doesn't account for why we experience it in terms of colors and other sensations.

Isn't this an explanation that could equally be applied to any possible outcome? That is, it merely restates that since all properties of the mind are evolved, qualia must also be evolved. But it doesn't provide any account of how this works. — Echarmion

Yeah, presumably the task is left up to neuroscience.

The usage of the word illusion in this context strikes me as strange. What is it an illusion of? If the experience is "real" but doesn't involve any qualia, then the qualia are not an illusion. They're a representation. But that just brings us back to the view Frankish rejects. — Echarmion

I think he said in this podcast that perception is representational, but introspection of perception is where it seems like the representation has special properties of qualia. And that's the illusion. But it's a useful one.

This sounds like a metacognition approach.

This also seems consistent with what Dennett says: it's not that qualia -- which are familiar, everyday phenomena -- do not exist, but that they are not what we think about them. — Kenosha Kid

Yeah, except they wouldn't have the properties for us to use the word qualia. We're conscious, just not in the way it seems, I guess. That does raise the question of what it means to be conscious.

Wouldn't that be a form of panpsychism?

Quining the Qualia Proponents in This Thread.

Edit - better yet:

Quining the Qualia Lovers and their Bastard Zombies

please rephrase, I don't get it. — Olivier5

I mean, if you implemented the functions in humans responsible for the conscious experience of a red apple in a robot or some other non-biological system, would it necessarily be conscious?

I didn't mean p-zombie humans. More basic as in the functions themselves responsible for consciousness. Which means anywhere those functions are implemented.

LOL @ the title change. I guess we have strayed too far from the paper, but the topic naturally leads to the wider discussion.

or The Walking Dead, starting around season six.

At this juncture, it is clear that the bulk of the evidence supports the claim that visual mental imagery not only draws on many of the same mechanisms used in visual perception, but also that topographically organised early visual areas play a functional role in some types of imagery.

Sounds similar to the hallucination argument in favor of indirect realism.

Do you reject the notion of p-zombie functions as logically impossible?

As brain shivers — bongo fury

Sounds suspiciously like a zombie!

But is it reasonable to expect that any animals without language ever "recall a scene to mind"? — bongo fury

I wouldn't be surprised if apes, elephants, whales/dolphins and some birds did it.

Physics provides an account of it, but it doesn't account for it. — Wayfarer

Well, yeah. That gets into Chalmers metaphysical (or was it natural?) versus logical supervenience. The physics doesn't entail consciousness, although it provides the conditions for it.

But also whence comes distance, mass, time, motion, molecules, plant life and lower organism sentience? — Andrew M

Physics, chemistry and biology already account for that stuff.

These features are all defined in reference to our human perspective (consider Einstein with his measuring-rods, clocks and observers giving an operational meaning to his relativistic theories). — Andrew M

That has to do with the speed of light and inertial frames, not perceivers. Perceivers are only used for thought experiments to show their clocks and measuring-rods are different, but there's no need for that. Happens for any objects and events.

As with the train speed example, there is no "view from nowhere". — Andrew M

But there is, because life evolved long after the universe was around, and science can detail the universe in places where there is no life and no perceivers.

However, if you're arguing from a Kantian/correlationist position and not a realist one, then that's another matter. I'm pretty sure Dennett is a realist/physicalist, as is Chalmers, except for consciousness.

I'm not sure the consciousness debate matters for Kantians, since the empirical world includes all the colors, sounds, etc. So I get why you would deny Nagel's "view from nowhere". The consciousness debate seems to only matter for physicalism, pun unintended. At least that's how Chalmers approaches it, with his talk of supervenience and p-zombies.

So let's say a technology like Neuralink is used to treat blindness. Images from a headset are sent to a chip surgically implanted in the brain which encodes the image data as electrical signals for the brain such that the patient can see again.

In this case, technology is acting in place of the retina and optic nerve to provide the brain with what it needs to form visual perceptions. Let's say no problem with direct realism so far.

But then as the technology advances, additional information in the form of digital overlays are also sent such that the patient sees various enhancements such as text, additional images and colors to highlight information not readily available to normal vision. Similar to the terminator's perspective from the Terminator movies. This would be like the Hololens technology. The indirect realist might say this is kind of what the brain is doing anyway.

Further advances allow complete digital environments to be sent to the patient. So now it's full on VR being beamed into the brain. Basically the visual part of a BIV. In all three scenarios, the indirect realist would challenge the direct realist to justify saying what's a mental image and what's direct awareness, since there is a causal relation from outside the body via the tech.

Third, the claim that perceptual experiences are essentially relational articulates the distinctive phenomenological character of perceptual experience, or ‘what it is like’ for a subject to have an experience. Fourth, given that veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational, they differ in kind to non-veridical experiences such as hallucinations. — Allen

The indirect realist is going to disagree that perception being relational makes the experience different from hallucinations and other non-perceptual experiences. Particularly if the same neural circuits are used for visual experiences of all kinds.

I gather that the direct realist is saying that when we have a hallucination, we are aware of the hallucination, but when we have a perception, we're aware of the external object. The difference being the content of the experience. Same for dreams and imagination.

The indirect realist might question why perceptual experience is different, other than the causal chain, which of course the indirect realist agrees with.

Agreed that Kantian perception would be direct regarding empirical objects, but are the empirical objects the mind-independent ones realism is concerned with? Idealism also endorses direct perception, because the ideas are right there in the mind.

But if you just mean that they should be allowed to say, speaking loosely, "tables are not really solid", and "we don't really see apples", then I guess it's a way of getting their point across. It seems far too misleading to me, and I've only seen it from bad popularizations. — jamalrob

It means the world is different than it appears to us. Now whether that's a problem for direct realism is what the debate is about. I say the evidence is the world isn't colored the way we perceive it to be, and this means that naive realism (or primitivism) about visual objects is false, although a more sophisticated causal argument for direct realism could be true.

So...when I'm looking at the the moon I can cover it with my hand, but the moon is too big to be covered by my hand, therefore I'm not seeing the moon, but just a mental object. Is that about right? — jamalrob

I quoted eight objections to direct realism from a paper countering those objections a few posts back, while making what the author thought were some necessary concessions to defeat all eight. I'm not sure which objection your example falls into, but it's not a very convincing one in my book, and not what the color argument is about. Some of the objections are stronger than others, and some of the concessions made to defeat all eight are more troubling for direct reaiism than others.

I think that this is as confused as saying that solid things are not actually solid. — jamalrob

They're not solid in the way old-fashioned materialists thought they were. It being mostly empty space held together by electromagnetic bonds would have blown their minds.

Following unenlightened, I think that our scientific investigations, rather than being a substitute for seeing, explain it, i.e., explain how we see red apples. — jamalrob

It doesn't explain how there's a red experience, only that there is a strong correlation with our biology of vision.

And anyway, the world is different than how it appears to us, at the very least because we don't have the sensory capabilities to perceive most of it. Our vision, as useful as it is, doesn't capture most of the light, which would make the world look colored in quite different ways, assuming that's how we saw all those radio and microwaves and what not. Which would be a function of our biology that we don't understand.

don't know what we're talking about here. — jamalrob

One of the challenges to direct perception is that if the object appears differently in some ways to us than it is, then we're directly aware of a mental object, and only indirectly the physical cause.

I may have used Kantian terms, but that wasn't the substance. — jamalrob

I'm got to two current threads confused. Was the substance that we have direct access via perceptual sensations? That seeing color is what makes us visually aware of objects?

If I recall correctly, those of us involved came to an agreement on Kantian terms, not Dennett's. But if we're talking in terms of the modern consciousness debate, I'm more inclined to side with Chalmers.

I don't doubt I've once again phrased some of this poorly; it is genuinely awkward to talk about, but I'm not convinced there's philosophical hay to make of that awkwardness. — Srap Tasmaner

The problem is how is there a conscious experience at all? We have detectors that can discriminate light and sound, yet they're not conscious. When we examine our brains, no consciousness is found there. It's not like some neural pattern is colored red.