The notion of consciousness is, at its heart, claiming there's a difference between mental images and camera-images but we know there's none. Ergo, consciousness - the purported difference in identicals - can't be real. Consciousness is an illusion. . . .
what we call awareness is simply the formation of mental images in our minds, and that's precisely what happens inside a camera. — TheMadFool

There is one significant difference between forming images on a light-sensitive Surface, and forming images in a meaning-sensitive Mind. The mental Image, or Illusion, has personal Meaning & Significance & Aboutness & Awareness. Imaging is not awareness; but Imagination is. :smile:

Note 1 -- The light-focusing optics of a camera are called "objectives". Perhaps, that's because the camera has no "subjective" perspective.
Note 2 -- The camera metaphor is an abstraction from human vision, but it abstracts-out the Knowing of a mind. The map is not the terrain.

The temptation to believe in unicorn-illusions that are no less fanciful than unicorns. — bongo fury

You haven't given any argument to think such a thing though, just a pointless digression into the Chinese room.
Let's get back to brass tacks: I'm in agonizing pain. Is this pain an illusion, and if so, what's the difference if the illusion is also painful?

I fear you're missing the point of what consciousness is. Consciousness is all about awareness - a certain entity is conscious if and only if it's aware of its environment and itself and what we call awareness is simply the formation of mental images in our minds, and that's precisely what happens inside a camera. — TheMadFool

Bad argument - cameras are not aware. Consciousness is an attribute of conscious organisms - devices including cameras, computers and telescopes are no more aware or conscious than are bicycles, abacus, or mirrors. None of them are sentient. So a camera image and a mental image are worlds apart - that's without even mentioning the fact that camera images are created by humans in the first place.

Let's get back to brass tacks: I'm in agonizing pain. Is this pain an illusion, and if so, what's the difference if the illusion is also painful? — Mijin

Imagine being burned at the stake as you keep telling yourself the pain is an illusion.

Bad argument - cameras are not aware. Consciousness is an attribute of conscious organisms - devices including cameras, computers and telescopes are no more aware or conscious than are bicycles, abacus, or mirrors. None of them are sentient. So a camera image and a mental image are worlds apart - that's without even mentioning the fact that camera images are created by humans in the first place. — Wayfarer

Is there any difference between the image in your eyes and the image on a camera's image sensor? Before you answer that remember a camera is defined as a device that records events/people/places. What good is any kind of recorder if it isn't faithful to the actual things it records. In other words, if instead of your eyes, you had a camera, the image would be identical. You have absoloutely no reason at all to say the image in your eyes is consciousness and that in the camera is not. Consciousness then is a difference that is unreal. Consciousness is an illusion, Dennett has, for better or for worse, hit the nail on its head.

That said, I recall trying to offer an exploded-view of the phenomenon of consciousness. It's as below,

1. X, the thing capable of awareness

2. Y, the thing that X can be aware of [includes the external world and the internal world, X itself]

3. X becoming aware of Y, consciousness.

4. In my humble opinion, X = the brain = the camera

5. Y = the world = the brain (self-reflection) = the camera (selfie)

6. X becoming aware of Y = the image in the eye = the image on the camera's image sensor

Pay close attention to 6. The image in the eye = the image on the camera's sensor. There's absolutely no difference between the two. So, if anyone does claim that there's a difference - consciousness - that difference can't be real. Consciousness is an illusion.

Is there any difference between the image in your eyes and the image on a camera's image sensor? — TheMadFool

Worlds of difference. A camera image is either chemical emulsion if it's old-fashioned film, or patterns of pixels if it's digital photography. It's arguably not even 'an image' until it's recognised by an observer; cameras don't recognise images. An image is not an image to a camera, because no camera is capable of intentional action or interpretation.

Let me ask you a counter question: do you know what an 'ontological distinction' is? Do you know why it might be argued that there is an ontological distinction to be made between devices (which are constructed by humans) and sentient beings?

You underestimate Siri. — TheMadFool

That, or you overestimate it.

Worlds of difference. A camera image is either chemical emulsion if it's old-fashioned film, or patterns of pixels if it's digital photography. It's arguably not even 'an image' until it's recognised by an observer; cameras don't recognise images. — Wayfarer

Exactly.
In the case of digital cameras, data is stored in some file format that would likely be meaningless without knowing the format. There's no direct 1:1 correspondence between this data and the real world (especially if it's using lossy compression) because that's not its purpose; the purpose is to store data that when unpacked or whatever will allow us to display images at the required fidelity for the (human) users.

You have absoloutely no reason at all to say the image in your eyes is consciousness and that in the camera is not. — TheMadFool

Again, what image in your eye? As I mentioned upthread, there is lots of reason to doubt that a single image mapped to the world exists anywhere except on the retina*.
A hell of a lot of processing of image components happens within the neurons of the eye, long before it gets to the brain, and those pieces appear to be separately processed on different sections of the visual cortex. Meanwhile, a huge number of neurons feed back to the eye, because what we see is also in large part a function of what our prediction and categorization engines are expecting to see based on the past data.

* And even in the case of the surface of the retina, the cells do not fire synchronously, so even there there is no image corresponding to a single time slice of reality.

6. X becoming aware of Y = the image in the eye = the image on the camera's image sensor — TheMadFool

I always know that someone is about to handwave consciousness, because they focus on awareness.
Awareness is the low-hanging fruit. A good description of awareness, that makes testable predictions, would indeed be incredibly useful, but it would be a foundational step in understanding consciousness.

Instead the tendency with people like Dennett is to throw out some explanation for awareness that they find plausible, and imply that solves the much harder problems of consciousness because reasons.

Please clarify, if possible. If not possible, no worries. — bongo fury

Read the rest of the post. The tree ring example doesn't clarify things for you?

Let me ask you a counter question: do you know what an 'ontological distinction' is? Do you know why it might be argued that there is an ontological distinction to be made between devices (which are constructed by humans) and sentient beings? — Wayfarer

What is the distinction? Both cameras and sentient beings are physical objects. Seems to me that you'd have just as difficult of a problem explaining how images are in brains.

Worlds of difference. A camera image is either chemical emulsion if it's old-fashioned film, or patterns of pixels if it's digital photography. It's arguably not even 'an image' until it's recognised by an observer; cameras don't recognise images. An image is not an image to a camera, because no camera is capable of intentional action or interpretation. — Wayfarer

The same can be said about eyeballs. Connect eyeballs to a brain, or a camera to a computer, and then you have interpretations of images.

No worries then.

Imagine being burned at the stake as you keep telling yourself the pain is an illusion. — Marchesk

There are a number of subcultures and individuals who claim to be able to demonstrate just that. That said, I still maintain that walking barefoot over hot coals hurts like hell.

You haven't given any argument to think such a thing though, — Mijin

Such a thing as what? That calling consciousness an illusion brings to the table only the temptation of beliefs as fanciful as unicorns? I haven't yet given an argument for that thing. True. I merely shared my impression of the likely flow of assumptions, in order to explain my initial suggestion that we answer this,

What's the distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness? — Mijin

with this,

The same as the distinction between an illusion of consciousness that (like the Chinese Room) doesn't have a proper semantics, and one that does. — bongo fury

...and thereby return to the important job of distinguishing consciousness (or conscious-illusion-ness if you must) from non-consciousness (or non-conscious-illusion-ness).

Since it appears you now want to gratefully tuck in (now that's it's on the table) to the temptations offered by calling consciousness an illusion, I guess this (my advising against) is what you understood to be the thing I need to back up with argument. In which case let me know if I still should. Or else you didn't get my drift, in which case, my bad signposting.

In either case,

Let's get back to brass tacks: I'm in agonizing pain. Is this pain an illusion, and if so, what's the difference if the illusion is also painful? — Mijin

But for me, the important difference is,

between a self-driving car able through mere syntax to complain of bodily trauma and [on the other hand] an as yet fictional self-driving car able to play the social game of pointing appropriate words at the same trauma. — bongo fury

Thus avoiding unnecessary talk of either internal pain qualia or internal pain-illusion qualia or internal pain qualia-illusions.

But nonetheless distinguishing non-conscious from (according to me) conscious.

I agree with you about the whole issue of pain being part of the equation because we are sentient beings. The whole argument that consciousness is an illusion speaks as if we are like computers, with consciousnes as silmulcarum.

It also excludes the whole emotional dimension of perception of the world and I would argue that the emotional intensity and depths of the internal world is the seat of consciousness.

But I realise that I come from a different perspective really because I there may be layers of consciousness, including the more subconscious ones, as spoken of by the psychoanalytic theorists. Personally, I think that the neuroscientists capture a lot of truth. However, if philosophers speak from the perspective of neuroscience as the only relevant psychological foundation what we end up with is a one dimensional model of consciousness.

Ok.

Since it appears you now want to gratefully tuck in (now that's it's on the table) to the temptations offered by calling consciousness an illusion — bongo fury

Have we been talking past each other all this time?
No, I don't want to call consciousness an illusion. In fact, to me I don't see the point: it's essentially saying that we don't have feelings, we just feel we do.

Thus avoiding unnecessary talk of either internal pain qualia or internal pain-illusion qualia or internal pain qualia-illusions. — bongo fury

I don't consider this "unnecessary"; I consider this the most fascinating and difficult issue within consciousness.

If one were to say "Let's put the hard problems of consciousness to one side, as they seem intractable, and focus instead on the more digestible parts" then sure, I'm game. My background is neurology and I'm familiar with the need to be pragmatic, and choose modest progress over none.
I'm just a bit touchy when it comes to consciousness, because Dennett and his adherents don't just put the hard problem to one side; they handwave it. Sadly, handwaving has zero predictive or inferential power. If everyone subscribed to this way of thinking, we'll never make real progress in understanding consciousness.

No, I don't want to call consciousness an illusion. In fact, to me I don't see the point: it's essentially saying that we don't have feelings, we just feel we do. — Mijin

Indeed. Even the illusion is itself being conscious of something.

I'm just a bit touchy when it comes to consciousness, because Dennett and his adherents don't just put the hard problem to one side; they handwave it. — Mijin

Indeed. It's like some of the more staunch behaviorists in the earlier part of the 20th century. They didn't just want to put mental content to the side, they wanted to handwave it away in favor of stimulus and response, as if that alone could explain everything humans do.

Have we been talking past each other all this time? — Mijin

We'll always have Paris.

No, I don't want to call consciousness an illusion. — Mijin

Are you sure you don't want to call it "the illusion that proves it's not an illusion"? Oh, hang on...

In fact, to me I don't see the point: it's essentially saying that we don't have feelings, we just feel we do. — Mijin

Likewise,

Indeed. Even the illusion is itself being conscious of something. — Marchesk

Thereby getting nowhere, but perpetuating the myth of an internal world.

Thereby getting nowhere, but perpetuating the myth of an internal world. — bongo fury

Our an external one? That sword can cut either way.

This neuroscientist is going somewhere:

The real problem of consciousness, it's in distinction from Chalmers hard and easy problems that we talked about before. The basic idea of the real problem is to accept that consciousness exists, it's part of the universe, we have conscious experiences. And brains exist. One thing we know about consciousness is that it depends on the brain in quite close ways. And the idea is to describe as richly as we can the phenomenology of conscious experience. And to try to build explanatory bridges, as best we can, from brain mechanisms to this phenomenology. This has been called the mapping problem by Chalmers himself.

https://philosophybites.com/2017/07/anil-seth-on-the-real-problem-of-consciousness.html — Anil Seith

Or an external one? That sword can cut either way. — Marchesk

I'm glad you find that obvious. But you digress.

I'm glad you find that obvious. But you digress. — bongo fury

I don't actually think that. I'm okay with my dualism. Physicalism doesn't have to be true.

It's just if consciousness can be an illusion, why not the external world?

It's just if consciousness can be an illusion, why not the external world? — Marchesk

Exactly. Pushing doubt is a two-edged sword.

It's just if consciousness can be an illusion, — Marchesk

"Conscious" is what we call certain kinds of thinking, which are real brain shivers. Those kinds of thinking cause us to indulge fictions about an internal world, which are fictional.

Calling a fiction an illusion is an unnecessary conceptual hazard.

Okay, but if i'm brain shivering color and pain, that still needs to be explained.

Okay, but if i'm brain shivering color and pain, that still needs to be explained. — Marchesk

Thought you'd never ask. What you are doing is shivering your brain to make it ready to choose among color symbols and pain symbols, thereby ordering and classifying external illumination events and trauma events. It's hardly surprising, when you shiver about it, that the readying would habitually (and usually harmlessly) infer that features characteristic of the events and the symbols were true of the shivers.

The problem is those sounds and colors don't exist in external objects. It's rather sound waves and photons. The sounds and colors we experience are shivered into existence. But that shivering is explained in the same language as the external objects. Just more stuff doing functional things.

An amoeba also has sensory abilities, does that mean it is conscious because of that? — Rafaella Leon

I've been watching some videos on YouTube : Journey to the MicroCosmos. And the minuscule single-cell organisms, swimming freely and nosing about, seem to have purposeful behavior. So, they are "animals" by definition. But what goes-on in their brainless blobs -- what it's like to be an amoeba -- is a moot question, until we are able to communicate with them. So, until then, I would attribute only a minuscule amount of Consciousness. :smile:

The problem is those sounds and colors don't exist in external objects. It's rather sound waves and photons. — Marchesk

Why "rather"? Sound events and illumination events are clearly external and public.

The sounds and colors we experience are shivered into existence. — Marchesk

Shivered into classes and orders, more like. E.g. pitches and hues.

Ducks into rows, as @unenlightened might or might not be on about.

Why "rather"? Sound events and illumination events are clearly external and public. — bongo fury

As physical waves, not experiences of color or sound.