Check my fire example for one. Another example is the screen you are observing right now. Does the light of this forum post explain the fundamental mechanical process that is letting you observe it right now? No. That is all Dennet is saying. Underlying the screen is a series of small pixels that are being turned into RBGY colors based on 1's and 0's on your machine. We don't see that. We see, "the illusion" of the entire process constructed into something more manageable and meaningful for us. — Philosophim

But how did you come to understand the underlying "mechanical" processes if not by some kind of observation? It sounds to me that you are simply talking about different views of the same thing. A view from the micro is no more "fundamental" than a view from the macro. To label one as "fundamental" and the other as "illusory" is simply projecting value on a particular view of the same thing. You are ascribing to another form of dualism - the fundamental vs the illusory. You haven't rejected dualism. You ended up embracing it.

The "illusion" of the entire process has causal power. It isn't the underlying mechanical processes of pixels displaying colors based on 1's and 0's that then drives my behavior to respond. It is the words that I read that drives my behavior. I don't point to the alternating state of 1's and 0's as the reason I am responding. I point to the meaning of your words as the reason.

Who has better evidence of me being conscious? If we cannot understand it by our own perception, which perception is he talking about - my perception of my consciousness, or your perception of my consciousness? — Harry Hindu

In other words, who has "fundamental" evidence of me being conscious?

And I agree with him wholeheartedly. Just because we can't explain our own consciousness is no good reason to call it magic.

Dennet believes consciousness is a result of informational and functional properties. There is no "consciousness" that is independent of this. It is not that Dennet doesn't think we call things pain, pleasure, etc,. What he's saying is these are the results of functional processes. — Philosophim

It may well be that consciousness itself is a functional process. Ever thought of that?

And I agree with him wholeheartedly. Just because we can't explain our own consciousness is no good reason to call it magic. — Olivier5

You, as always, misunderstand what you are being told. Dennett does not think consciousness is magic. Consciousness as described by Strawson is magic. There is nothing to understand because it isn't real.

Consciousness as described by Strawson is magic. — Kenosha Kid

You have a quote that proves that, or is it just something you made up?

Lots of talk about eliminativism and gotcha games around it, not much talk about the dispute. Regarding "direct acquaintance" with "fundamental qualities". Advise reading Dennet's Quining Qualia rather than playing a gotcha game of "it's magic" vs "if you have experiences Dennett is wrong".

"Qualia" is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of (for you) will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them.

...My claim, then, is not just that the various technical or theoretical concepts of qualia are vague or equivocal, but that the source concept, the "pretheoretical" notion of which the former are presumed to be refinements, is so thoroughly confused that even if we undertook to salvage some "lowest common denominator" from the theoreticians' proposals, any acceptable version would have to be so radically unlike the ill-formed notions that are commonly appealed to that it would be tactically obtuse--not to say Pickwickian--to cling to the term. Far better, tactically, to declare that there simply are no qualia at all. — Dennett

If you can't suspend the impulse toward metaphysical speculation affirming the existence of consciousness upon seeing "something red", then you're simply not currently in the right frame of mind to learn anything from that kind of discussion. Whether mental states have the content "we feel"/"we expect" them to is roughly what's at stake - whether there is such a thing as mental content which is essentially distinguished from physical states is a separate but related issue.

How anyone could expect to justify a position one way or the other on both issues with a gotcha game is beyond me.

You have a quote that proves that, or is it just something you made up? — Olivier5

Your quote of Dennett's suffices.

Dennett is saying that the dualist conception of consciousness is an illusion. Basically Strawson holds that consciousness is this magical thing that directly reveals reality to us, contrary to all knowledge about how we become conscious of things (e.g. how the human eye works). Dennett says that this direct awareness is an illusion, and he is right. We are unconscious of the mediators between reality and perception, therefore we perceive that we perceive things directly. — Kenosha Kid

I think you're misrepresenting Strawson's position a number of ways here. For one, Strawson is a self-described monist and a physicalist, just of a panpsychist bent. He also doesn't hold that consciousness is a magical thing, though he may consider it to be fundamental and irreducible. So much as Strawson does use the term "magic" it's used to describe strong emergence, which is something he explicitly rejects (and also part of the reason why he believes in panpsychism in the first place).

You also seem to be suggesting that the dispute between Dennett and Strawson is over naive realism vs. something like indirect realism, but I don't think that was what Dennett was referring to. Instead, his disagreements come over the existence of qualia or the subjective aspects of what we call experience.

I think you're misrepresenting Strawson's position a number of ways here. For one, Strawson is a self-described monist and a physicalist... — Mr Bee

I didn't say Strawson was a dualist, just that he has a dualist's idea of consciousness. That said, any physicalist panpsychist is also a dualist, since panpsychism is not a description of physical nature, i.e. it is unfussed about observation. Or sense, for that matter.

For one, Strawson is a self-described monist and a physicalist, just of a panpsychist bent. He also doesn't hold that consciousness is a magical thing, though he may consider it to be fundamental and irreducible. — Mr Bee

Two bits of magic in a supposedly unmagical thing ;)

So much as Strawson does use the term "magic" it's used to describe strong emergence, which is something he explicitly rejects (and also part of the reason why he believes in panpsychism in the first place). — Mr Bee

Strong emergence is magic, agreed. But so is irreducible consciousness. It is something one cannot question, derive the origins of, or study: one simply has to take it on faith that exists, like God or UFOs.

You also seem to be suggesting that the dispute between Dennett and Strawson is over naive realism vs. something like indirect realism, but I don't think that was what Dennett was referring to. Instead, his disagreements come over the existence of qualia or the subjective aspects of what we call experience. — Mr Bee

I don't think that's how I characterised it. Rather I said that Strawson's argument is that if you don't believe in his magical consciousness, you don't believe in consciousness full stop. Dennett's counter is that this is wrong. One can believe consciousness exists without having to adopt Strawson's idea of it.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that most Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. “Of course, we agree that consciousness or experience exists,” they say—but when they say this they mean something that specifically excludes qualia.

Few have been fully explicit in their denial, but among those who have been, we find Brian Farrell, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, and the generally admirable Daniel Dennett. — Strawson

Of course, even this straw man is obvious. Dennett himself does not reject the notion of qualia.

"Qualia" is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of (for you) will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them. — Dennett

So nor does Dennett deny qualia, rather he disagrees with Strawson about what they are, what their status is.

Whether mental states have the content "we feel"/"we expect" them to is roughly what's at stake — fdrake

Mental states cannot be explored by any other mean than introspection. The way they appear to us through introspection is pretty much the only data we have about them. No bona fide analysis of their "content" can start from a dogmatic position that the data is not true.

I didn't say Strawson was a dualist, just that he has a dualist's idea of consciousness. That said, any physicalist panpsychist is also a dualist, since panpsychism is not a description of physical nature, i.e. it is unfussed about observation. Or sense, for that matter. — Kenosha Kid

Of course Strawson would take issue with you about that, but I'll leave that for you two to work out.

Strong emergence is magic, agreed. But so is irreducible consciousness. It is something one cannot question, derive the origins of, or study: one simply has to take it on faith that exists, like God or UFOs. — Kenosha Kid

I don't think that Strawson is saying that consciousness is not something that can be questioned, or explained. That's the New Mysterianist view. He's merely saying that it is not a thing that can be reduced into anything more fundamental but that doesn't prevent one from looking into it's origins or anything like that. For instance, a strong Emergentist would say that consciousness is an irreducible byproduct of certain configurations of matter, emphasis on the word "byproduct".

Personally I don't see anything "magical" about irreducibility in itself because inevitably one has to arrive at something basic in their ontology. When Strawson says that consciousness is irreducible he's suggesting that it's like the concepts of mass, space, or time, which we take to be basic for the most part unless proven otherwise.

Rather I said that Strawson's argument is that if you don't believe in his magical consciousness, you don't believe in consciousness full stop. Dennett's counter is that this is wrong. One can believe consciousness exists without having to adopt Strawson's idea of it. — Kenosha Kid

What is Strawson's idea of consciousness, in your mind? I'm not sure I'm clear on what that is.

Of course, even this straw man is obvious. Dennett himself does not reject the notion of qualia. — Kenosha Kid

I'm not sure about that, but I've never really been sure about what Dennett says to be honest. Depending on who you ask, either his views are extremist or sensible, but he is widely seen as a critic of qualia.

I'm definitely inclined to a methodological naturalist approach. I've grown quite fond of framing things in terms of their elemental constituency. In addition I also argue for emergence. I'm no physicalist, however. I'm certainly no dualist either.

...formally speaking: to reduce X to Y isn’t to say that X doesn’t exist. It’s simply to say that X is “really just” Y, that X is “nothing more than” Y, that X is “nothing over and above” Y. And since Y is assumed to exist, X is also held to exist. For although X is nothing more than Y, it’s also nothing less than Y. When you reduce chemical processes to physical processes, you don’t deny that chemical processes exist.

All true.

While I would readily agree that consciousness does not reduce to dispositions to behaviour, the Pizza Theory analogy below does not work as an argument against all other reductionist approaches to consciousness/minds.

Consciousness consists entirely of thought and belief. It is nothing less, and nothing more.

...to say that experience is just pizza is to deny that consciousness exists, for we know that conscious experience exists, we know what it is like, and we know that it isn’t just pizza. So, too, for the claim that consciousness is just behavior.

Saying that consciousness is thought and belief does not deny the existence of consciousness, any more than saying that water is H20 denies the existence of water. There are issues here with the language use of Strawson.

When someone states "we know what consciousness is like" they are most certainly presupposing a.)there is such a thing(one and only one thing that counts) as consciousness, that b.)there is something else that consciousness is like. Neither is true.

Consciousness is self-contained in the individual creature capable of forming, having, and/or holding thought and belief about the world and/or itself. Individual experience is as plentiful as the sheer quantity of individuals capable of experiencing. So, I've no issue with saying that each and every individual experience consists of meaningful events particular to that individual. We experience being ourselves, but simple, basic, and raw experience alone is utterly inadequate for knowledge about how consciousness emerges onto the world stage, what it consists of, and/or how it evolves along an evolutionary timeline.

We know that we see, smell, hear, feel(touch), and taste all sorts of things, and we sit and talk about it using all sorts of different linguistic frameworks. But what on earth could anyone be asking about if they were to query "What's it like to see?" It's not like anything else at all. The same holds good of queries about what it's like to smell, hear, feel(touch), taste, etc. Because physiological sensory perception is one necessary elemental constituent of consciousness, the same holds good of what consciousness is like.

No one knows what consciousness "is like", for consciousness is not like anything.

I don't think that Strawson is saying that consciousness is not something that can be questioned, or explained. That's the New Mysterianist view. He's merely saying that it is not a thing that can be reduced into anything more fundamental but that doesn't prevent one from looking into it's origins or anything like that. — Mr Bee

Can you give an example of something that is irreducible but can have a natural origin?

But, to quote Strawson:

Some people not only deny the existence of consciousness; they also claim not to know what is being presumed to exist. Block responds to these deniers by quoting the reply Louis Armstrong is said to have given to those who asked him what jazz was (some people credit Fats Waller): “If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know.” Another response is almost as good, although it’s condemned by some who follow Wittgenstein. If someone asks what conscious experience is, you say, “You know what is from your own case.” (You can add, “Here’s an example,” and give them a sharp kick.) When it comes to conscious experience, there’s a rock-bottom sense in which we’re fully acquainted with it just in having it. The having is the knowing. — Strawson

Like I said, you're not supposed to ask about it, you just have to accept it.

Personally I don't see anything "magical" about irreducibility in itself because inevitably one has to arrive at something basic in their ontology. — Mr Bee

Yes, but it doesn't follow that, because there are elementary things, and because there are cars, there can be elementary cars. Our actual studies on elements of reality show they are basic, simple, dumb, and not in the least homocentric.

What is Strawson's idea of consciousness, in your mind? I'm not sure I'm clear on what that is. — Mr Bee

Essentially the above, that it's something irreducible that has to be taken at face value and accepted on faith. His idea is manifest in his reaction and straw-man--building in the face of people who do question what it is, how it's made, how it works. He's a stop sign on the road to knowledge.

And yet, to reduce consciousness to behavior and dispositions to behavior is to eliminate it. To say that consciousness is really nothing more than (dispositions to) behavior is to say that it doesn’t exist. Reductionists may continue to deny this, or claim that it begs the question—that it assumes the truth of the conclusion for which it’s arguing. Formally speaking, it does beg the question, and begging the question is a well-known theoretical sin. Sometimes, however, it is the correct response. — Strawson

Not great, is it.

:up:

I read "Quining Qualia" this morning, to try and work out what Dennett was saying and make some contribution to this discussion, but then realized that it had nothing to do with what people are talking about here. I suggest a reading group.

Thanks for that link.

:smile:

Can you give an example of something that is irreducible but can have a natural origin? — Kenosha Kid

Elementary particles, the fundamental forces of nature, space, time, etc. Anything that we take to be basic in our models is by definition irreducible. None of these things are "magical", it's just that they are what they are as far as we know.

Like I said, you're not supposed to ask about it, you just have to accept it. — Kenosha Kid

Um, I don't think that that was how the quote was meant to be understood. I think the point of what Strawson was saying there was that the very idea of conscious experience itself is, like I said elsewhere, basic and fundamental.

The thing about basic concepts is that it is impossible to explain them without merely pointing to examples of them that people already understand (that's why they're basic). If you ask me "what is red?" for instance, there's no way of explaining it without being circular. I can try to say that it's what you see when you look at an apple, but that's just referring to examples of red things. If you happen to be blind from birth, and have no idea what it even is like to look at one, there's absolutely nothing I can do to explain it to you. As stated in your quote: “If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know.”

Yes, but it doesn't follow that, because there are elementary things, and because there are cars, there can be elementary cars. Our actual studies on elements of reality show they are basic, simple, dumb, and not in the least homocentric. — Kenosha Kid

Well cars are reducible to smaller elements since we can break them down to their subatomic composition. As for conscious experience, that is a whole other question.

Also if you're implying that panpsychism is homocentric, I'd say it's quite the opposite. Panpsychist views aren't claiming that humanity is somehow special, or even that consciousness is. It's a pretty naturalistic view, which is why some have found it appealing.

Essentially the above, that it's something irreducible that has to be taken at face value and accepted on faith. — Kenosha Kid

What is to be taken at face value here? Experience itself? If that is the case, I don't think that that's really a controversial view. There's very little that we can be certain of in the world, but one thing that most of us can know without a doubt is the fact of our existence, our thoughts, and more generally our experience (you can ask Descartes that).

In addition, I would take issue with calling that "faith" as well since it seems like one of the few things we can know with certainty, which is the opposite of faith. To believe in an external world that isn't an illusion fabricated by some demon manipulating my experiences requires more faith than believing in the experiences themselves.

Mental states cannot be explored by any other mean than introspection. The way they appear to us through introspection is pretty much the only data we have about them. No bona fide analysis of their "content" can start from a dogmatic position that the data is not true. — Olivier5

Let's assume that's true:

(1) It still might be that exploring our phenomenal/experiential states rigorously leads us to doubt the folk theoretic notions we have regarding their elements. Accounts of phenomenal character arising from introspection can be revised.

(2) It might be that how we categorise experience reflectively/introspectively is different from but related to the categorisation processes in experience (eg: how I feel now is pain, "I feel pain"), the introspective mapping of the experience to the description might be a different procedure from an awareness the state one is in belongs in an experiential category. There are introspective biases.

(3) "What if I had a brain lesion right there?" Introspection alone cannot answer that, and it is relevant. There are relevant data streams introspection alone cannot access absent experiment.

(4) There are altered states of experience (phantom limbs, ganzfeld type experiments, perceptual illusions, meditative states, mental illnesses and disabilities, brain lesion patients, effects of priming on perception, cognitive load and change blindness...) which are not available to everyone at all times. In order to discover variations in phenomenal character over bodies and what they do, one has to use a scientific approach in tandem with the careful analysis of self reports. Introspection alone gives you the biased data of one person's self reports analysing themselves.

The premises which are provisionally accepted by any account of experience or consciousness deriving from introspection alone, then, might be part of the first word of any such analysis, but it's simply laziness to assume it must be the last because they have been accepted at the start.

I've read it as well, and could not for the sake of me understand his logic. One could call the taste of chocolate, the melodies of Vivaldi's Summer and the colors of the rainbow something else than 'qualia' if one finds a better word for such sense data (or just call it sense data). One can consider that the term "qualia" brings nothing useful, or that the way it is conceptualised by X or Y is wrong. But that doesn't make the taste of chocolate or the colors of the rainbow go away...

To me the word qualia simply means that sense data appears to us as in part qualitative. For instance, the quantitatively different wavelengths of visible lights are presented to our consciousness (to mine anyway) in the form of qualitatively different colors. However there is also some quantitative differences in perceptions, eg different intensities of pain, pleasure, light, sound etc. So I guess it could be called qualquantia. Maybe Dennet will like that better?

In any case, if Dennet does not deny our capacity to perceive sense data, and if he doesn't deny that green seem qualitatively different from red, his beef with "qualia" seems to me purely a question of personal dislike for some philosophers who like the concept and use it.

There's a very long discussion here which might help a bit. About qualia, not specifically about Dennett. If you refuse to bracket what is self evident to you, I can't help you, though.

Far better, tactically, to declare that there simply are no qualia at all. — Dennett

If that were the case then language wouldn't be visual in nature. "The grey matter between your ears" is a visual description, pointing to how things like other minds appear within consciousness. I don't see how such a description could ever be used if qualia didn't exist. When talking about neurons, Dennett can't seem to keep from talking in visual terms, as it appears from his own perspective. To then go and say that qualia don't exist just undermines anything else he asserts. Only a p-zombie could say such a thing and mean it.

But how did you come to understand the underlying "mechanical" processes if not by some kind of observation? It sounds to me that you are simply talking about different views of the same thing. A view from the micro is no more "fundamental" than a view from the macro. To label one as "fundamental" and the other as "illusory" is simply projecting value on a particular view of the same thing. You are ascribing to another form of dualism - the fundamental vs the illusory. You haven't rejected dualism. You ended up embracing it. — Harry Hindu

Dennet isn't saying that we can't use observation. We have to observe the underlying mechanical process after all. What he means by "fundamental" is "its small component parts that make up the whole." Its like H2O are elementary (fundamental) parts of water. You can't do science with "water", but you can do science with H20. Water is the "illusion" (Dennet's poor word choice that I personally wouldn't use) and H20 are the fundamental building blocks. Same with your brain and consciousness. I think everyone can accept that.

The "illusion" of the entire process has causal power. It isn't the underlying mechanical processes of pixels displaying colors based on 1's and 0's that then drives my behavior to respond. It is the words that I read that drives my behavior. — Harry Hindu

Sure, Dennet isn't denying this either. I swim in water, I don't swim in H20. The idea of H20 for my day to day purposes isn't going to matter. But if I'm a scientist, the fundamentals of why I'm able to swim in water deal with the molecular chemistry and forces involved. Dennet is trying to understand how consciousness, "the illusion" functions on a molecular chemistry level so he can understand it at a scientific level. And thank goodness. Can you imagine if we had people denying the idea of chemistry for water? We would never figure it out!

Now does that mean that the "illusion" is useless to study? Not at all. For my purposes, water is great to drink. Its just useless for Dennet's purposes, which is to discover the underlying fundamentals that produce the result.

It may well be that consciousness itself is a functional process. Ever thought of that? — Olivier5

You might not understand what a functional process is. Think of water. Water is made up of H20. It is the combination of these atoms and molecules that we see in mass as "water". If you get down to the fundamentals, you see that "water" doesn't exist, only molecules of H20. It is the emergent of functional process of all of those molecules gathered together that our brain processes as "water".

Consciousness is just like water according to Dennet. Our brain is the underlying mechanical process that functioning as a whole, produces consciousness. So when you talk of consciousness as a functional process, do you mean it is the result of the functioning of the brain, or something else?

(1) It still might be that exploring our phenomenal/experiential states rigorously leads us to doubt the folk theoretic notions we have regarding their elements. — fdrake

'Folks' have no theories. Individuals have theories. And nobody I know spends much time trying to theorize colors or sounds... In this domain, the classic (banal even, and often quite wrong-footed) approach which consists in criticizing the prevalent "common sense" is not doable because there is not much to criticize in terms of "common sense of colors".

(2) It might be that how we categorise experience reflectively/introspectively is different from but related to the categorisation processes in experience — fdrake

It is even quite probable. Memory is always imperfect, we are not fully transparent to ourselves, and any observation of a thing (eg a reflexive observation of how it feels to experience the qualia of a scarlet red) is by nature different from the thing itself (in this case, the qualia themselves). But since introspection is the only tool we have, we cannot but hope that it's by and large correct. There is no alternative, better tool we can use to study mental phenomena. Your hypothesis, if true, provides only a word of caution when using introspection.

one has to use a scientific approach in tandem with the careful analysis of self reports. — fdrake

A careful analysis of self reporting is just as scientific as the careful analysis of any other data. Scientific articles are full of self reporting.

The premises which are provisionally accepted by any account of experience or consciousness deriving from introspection alone, then, might be part of the first word of any such analysis, but it's simply laziness to assume it must be the last. — fdrake

Who said it should be the last? It must be the empirical basis on which we work; it's the data we have; explaining the data is what's needed, not denying its utility or existence.

The main point Dennett is making is that rejecting the dualist consciousness is not the same as saying consciousness itself is an illusion. Consciousness is very real, it just isn't what Strawson thinks it is. Strawson's fallacy is that disagreeing with him about what consciousness is means that it doesn't exist. It's basically the same argument that Christians often use about morality. — Kenosha Kid

The main point that Dennett is making is that consciousness can be fully understood in the third person. What he is saying is that science can, in principle, arrive at a complete objective understanding of the nature of consciousness, that there is nothing privileged or special about the first-person perspective. That is the nub of the entire issue, and the reason it's significant, is that if consciousness eludes third-person elucidation, then it's not in scope for science.

Chalmers challenge to that is:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is 'something it is like' to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

I claim that the subject of discussion in the debate is simply 'being' and that 'What it is like to be...' is just an awkward attempt to express that. The 'subject of experience' is customarily designated 'a being', as in the expression 'human being' - and this is what is out-of-scope for the objective sciences, as a matter of principle. Which is why I side with Chalmers in this debate.

There is also scientific recognition of 'the hard problem':

There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996) concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole. This is closely related to the problem known as the illusion of a stable visual world (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008).

We normally make about three saccades per second and detailed vision is possible only for about 1 degree at the fovea (cf. Figure 1). These facts will be important when we consider the version of the Visual Feature-Binding NBP in next section. There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008). The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail (Kaas and Collins 2003) and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry. Closely related problems include change- (Simons and Rensink 2005) and inattentional-blindness (Mack 2003), and the subjective unity of perception arising from activity in many separate brain areas (Fries 2009; Engel and Singer 2001).

Traditionally, the Neural Binding Problem concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades. But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996). There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538094/#Sec3title

This is another facet of a long-standing issue in philosophy, namely, the subjective unity of perception.

Our actual studies on elements of reality show they are basic, simple, dumb, and not in the least homocentric. — Kenosha Kid

You're still clinging to the myth of the atom. The 'standard model' itself is a fantastically complex intellectual and mathematical construct.

"water" doesn't exist, only molecules of H20. — Philosophim

That would be molecules of water, which therefore would supposedly exist...

So when you talk of consciousness as a functional process, do you mean it is the result of the functioning of the brain, or something else? — Philosophim

I just mean that consciousness is a functional process. It does something useful, otherwise it probably wouldn't exist.

I think it is a process of putting in the same 'space' a series of perceptions, ideas, memories, etc. for the purpose of comparing and analysing them, and ultimately take a coherent decision. So it's a data fusion process.

There's a very long discussion here which might help a bit. — fdrake

Lots of gotchas in there... :-) Any particular point in that discussion which seemed useful to you?

I would never call the world Maya, although we may never know it in itself. However, for what it's worth, i'd say that truth and consciousness are really nothing. They have no substance, no inner core at all; they are undistinguishable from pure nothing. They are pure nothing. Pure nothing experiences the world thru the body and never knows it truly either. This might be more Buddhist than Dennett-esque, but it's what makes most sense to me

There's no such thing as nothing.

Lots of gotchas in there.. — Olivier5

@Pfhorrest's points in it were good for a broadly sympathetic construal of the qualia concept in a (reasonably) theory neutral way. I tried to write some of my suspicions about it here. .



Would be cool.

It does exist as an experience, but yes nothing doesn't exist. This is why an afterlife is possible