One of the gists is that the emergence of organic life is also the emergence of intentional consciousness, even at very rudimentary levels of development. Like, nothing matters to a crystal or a rock formation, but things definitely matter to a bacterium, because it has skin (or a membrane) in the game, so to speak. — Wayfarer

All life has "drives". Viruses have "drives", to infect and reproduce. Roombas have "drives", to clean. This is not enough. What is relevant is whether these drives are experienced as such. We don't just have drives, our drives are sometimes (but crucially, not always) experienced as drives. We have this capacity, this does not remotely mean that to have a drive is intrinsically to experience that drive.

I would like to think that the sentience of beings other than human is not something for us to decide. Whether viruses or archai or plants are sentient may forever remain moot, but that anything we designate with term 'being' is sentient as part of the definition (hence the frequent Buddhist reference to 'all sentient beings'.) — Wayfarer

I thought that 'all sentient beings' was making a distinction between these and insentient beings?

I don't see why it is problematic for us to conceptually mark out what counts as sentience. For me, to be sentient is to have qualitative states. It is quite another thing (maybe impossible) to empirically know whether other species have qualitative states.

The claim is that in order for you to be conscious of anything at all, that consciousness must have a felt quality. — hypericin

Again, what is "having a felt quality", if not "being conscious of a feeling"?

Have you said anything more than that being conscious is being conscious?

Seems to me that such an approach seems profound, seems to be providing an explanation, until one looks closely.

I would argue that qualia is the bedrock of sentience. — hypericin

Here's the same thing again; to be sentient is to perceive or feel; and saying "qualia is the bedrock of sentience" sounds cool, as if "Ah! Now we know! it's qualia that explain consciousness!"

But look again. Qualia are perceptions and feelings. so "qualia is the bedrock of sentience" just says "perceptions and feelings are the bedrock of sentience"...

The feeling of having an explanation dissolves... We've just said the same thing with different words.

Roombas have "drives", to clean. — hypericin

But they don't heal, grow, reproduce, or mutate. Agree that it's very hard to determine what is or isn't sentient at borderline cases such as viruses (presumably not) or jellyfish and so on.

Somewere I once read the aphorism that 'a soul is any being capable of saying "I am"'. i rather liked that expression.

One of the gists is that the emergence of organic life is also the emergence of intentional consciousness, even at very rudimentary levels of development. — Wayfarer

Also the emergence of information processing.

I thought that 'all sentient beings' was making a distinction between these and insentient beings? — hypericin

Can you give me an example of an insentient being?

The second two examples use "aware" in its other sense, which is simply to know a certain fact.
To be aware of a mosquito bite, aware of a sunset, aware of a feeling of jealousy, are all qualitative states. There is something it is like to experience each of these. What each is like is quite different. What unifies them is that they are all varieties of qualitative conscious states, they each have a felt quality. "Qualia" bundles this property of having a felt quality into a conceptual bucket. — hypericin

IMO I don't even think that we can say that one can 'know' something without a qualitative experience.

For instance, I don't think that my computer 'knows' the information it processes and stores. Rather, it seems to me that qualitative experience is a precondition of 'having knowledge'. So, while I think the distinction you make is relevant, I believe that we should say that 'knowledge' is a specific kind of 'awareness' (in the general sense of the presence of a qualitative experience).

:lol: I didn't necessarily think I was blowing anyone's doors down! But I don't think I said nothing either.

Just look at all the ways consciousness has been defined in the past. You just said the term was up to us to define. Wayfarer just quoted:

Somewere I once read the aphorism that 'a soul is any being capable of saying "I am"' — Wayfarer

Consciousness has never been a clear, fixed concept. Whereas qualia, your feelings about the term aside, is much more precisely defined. If the unclear term can be defined in terms of the clear term, even seeming tautologously, then that is progress. At least we would know what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness. Does that explain consciousness? Of course not.

Agree that it's very hard to determine what is or isn't sentient at borderline cases such as viruses (presumably not) or jellyfish and so on. — Wayfarer

Viruses are a hard no. They don't even have volition, they make no decisions, they are essentially giant, extraordinarily complex, free floating molecules. Jellyfish seem to be the upper limit of what can be achieved with no central nervous system. Probably not, but as you say it is extremely hard to rule out entirely.

My hunch is that consciousness is the ultimate fulfillment of the engineering principles of modularization and abstraction. It is an extremely efficient strategy for abstracting and organizing information that would otherwise overwhelm the nervous system. We have to integrate all the physical senses, bodily senses, emotions, memories, thoughts. Based on this enormous mass of information, we are supposed to act, moment by moment. If there were no abstraction, if these were all just raw electrical inputs, the brain would be totally overwhelmed. So the brain's strategy is to transform these raw inputs into abstractions, and act based on them. Our lived experience is that of the brain's decision maker. Our world consists in these abstractions, qualia, and from them, we attend to the relevant subset, we predict, and we act.

This strategy has probably coevolved multiple times in different evolutionary branches. To detect consciousness, we would have to understand the principle whereby the brain achieves this kind abstraction, and examine the extraordinarily complex nervous systems of the animals that might be using it.

So we accept a poor definition over contemplating that consciousness is an ambivalent notion?

In first aid we are taught to test to see if someone is unconscious by asking for a response - "can you hear me? Open your eyes! What's your name? Squeeze my hand!". Some folk tend to forget this sort of thing doesn't apply to jellyfish and rocks.

In extremis, people may be conscious but unresponsive, which has led to a body of work looking for "no-report" tests for consciousness. One suggestion is that medical folk look for the "neural correlate of consciousness", which face the problem of how to establish conscious experience without first-person evidence. No-report paradigms rely on eye-movement, neuro-imaging, or physiological measures as indicators of consciousness. The trouble with no-report approaches is that they tend to diagnose cases of consciousness as cases of unconsciousness, the “bored monkey” problem, in which a monkey appears unconscious because it fails to follow the red dot, when it's just bored. Perhaps the panpsychists are right, and we are attributing unconsciousness ot rocks that are simply bored.

At the other extreme, would it make sense to insist that someone was unconscious, despite their protests to the contrary?

Is it that we have not yet found a clean and clear definition of consciousness, or is it that consciousness is not one thing, with a clean and clear definition?

Should we shoehorn consciousness into a definition, or learn to work with a level of ambiguity?

Should we shoehorn consciousness into a definition, or learn to work with a level of ambiguity? — Banno

What you are describing is not conceptual ambiguity, but rather epistemic ambiguity. We pick and choose our concepts, and I think mine cleanly maps to that which we are talking about when we talk of consciousness. It is an entirely different matter to reliably apply this concept to other beings. Qualia, and therefore consciousness, is private, as third person observers we only have indirect access, through behavior and self report.

Is it that we have not yet found a clean and clear definition of consciousness, or is it that consciousness is not one thing, with a clean and clear definition? — Banno

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ('hard-core pornography'); and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligently doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." — Justice Potter Stewart

What you are describing is not conceptual ambiguity, but rather epistemic ambiguity. — hypericin

I don't think so. Rather what you see as epistemic - an inability to know if someone is conscious - is the result of thinking about a family of related notions as if they were a single notion.

It's a mistake to think of consciousness only in terms of having a particular object, some private quale. The very idea of a private definition of consciousness is a philosophical artefact born of misusing words like “experience” and “inner” together with a misguided notion of essential characteristics. A picture that holds us enthralled.

Now I think I've demonstrated that, over the last page or so. I don't see that there is an account of qualia that can hold it's own.

None of what I've said here is to claim that we are not conscious. That's a common error hereabouts. What is shown is the poverty of adopting only one account, the possession of quale, as the arbiter of consciousness.

You do realise, though, that the use of this term 'quale' or 'qualia' is almost entirely unique to a very narrow band of discourse, conducted mainly by English and American academic philosophers, in respect of a very specific set of arguments? I've always seen it as a way of re-framing the debate in analytical terms which allow for the designation of the qualities of conscious experience as a spurious object in the attempt to defuse the cogency of Chalmer's original argument.

I've always seen it as a way of re-framing the debate in analytical terms — Wayfarer

Analytic philosophy is a broad church.

But that last paragaph is somewhat ambiguous. You see qualia as a way of undermining Chalmers? But for him the “hard problem” relies on the reality/cogency of qualia.

You do realise, though, that the use of this term 'quale' or 'qualia' is almost entirely unique to a very narrow band of discourse, — Wayfarer

Only if modern analytic discourse on consciousness is a narrow band in its entirety.

allow for the designation of the qualities of conscious experience as a spurious object — Wayfarer

Only grammatically. I don't see the nounification of "objects of consciousness" as carrying any particular ontological commitments.

Like @Banno I don't see how this is deployed against Chalmers, as I recall he makes use of the idea, which predates him by quite a bit.

Only if modern analytic discourse on consciousness is a narrow band in its entirety. — hypericin

I think it is, rather. The 'consciousness studies' discipline that developed in the early 1990's around Chalmers and a few others was much broader ranging than analytic phiiosophy. It included perspectives from cognitive science, phenomenology, psychology and many other disciplines. I didn't have Chalmers in mind when I made that remark, so much as his legendary opponent, Daniel Dennett. Chalmers does reference it in his original Facing Up paper, though:

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.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience".

Why 'more natural?' Because 'qualia' is academic jargon for something we are all intimately familiar with, namely, our experience of existence.

Been traveling, and the topic has once again run away from me.

"The universe is not composed of true statements" is also an indexical — noAxioms
I don't think so. — Banno

You do think so.

By definition, the actual world is the one we are in. — Banno

By this very idealistic definition, this particular universe is the actual one due to your presence in it, and possibly due to your perception of it. It depending on the context of your perceptions, this universe's actuality is an indexical.

Notice that we manage to name the smell of coffee and the shade of red in the paint shop, despite supposedly not being confident that your smell of coffee and your sensation of red has anything in common with mine?

How's that work, then. — Banno

It works in that the referent (especially with the coffee, not so much the paint) is the private sensation that evokes the public concept of coffee. It is not a referent to coffee. It being a reference to a private thing, it bears no implication that your personal experience of the scent is similar, but it can still be a reference to the personal experience of another.

I do agree that qualia has no place in a paint shop since orders for a very specific color ("match this swatch") can be (and very much is) done entirely by machine.

If you and I both smell coffee, it cannot be a reference to an indexical private thing, since we both smell it. — Banno

That usage has both of us detecting the same public actual coffee. That usage is not a reference to the experience of the scent, only to the action of detection of the public substance.

We can give someone who can see all colors but red all the information that can ever be given, and they will not know what red looks like. No description or data will help. — Patterner

I said as much in the OP. It's why we cannot know what it's like to be a bat, but given that, we also cannot go around asserting that there is or is not something it is like to be X. If you're not X, then this cannot be known.

I think if someone was going to strip away your qualia, you would object. Probably strenuously. — Patterner

Hence 1) my falsification test mentioned in the OP, 2) the inconceivability of a p-zombie acting undetectably the same, and 3) I suspect that the ability to object at all would be stripped away with the qualia gone. Such actions rely on continuous feedback, feedback which is now gone.

But are qualia real without consciousness? Qualia are first person as a matter of definition. — Wayfarer

Definitions don't tell you how things work. They're not metaphysics at all. They just indicate how language is to be used. I can't prove my solipsism by defining existence to be confined only to that which I directly perceive.

It's also not a 'brute fact' - being consciously aware is prior to the knowledge of any facts. — Wayfarer

Great, so since the roomba knows where it has been and where it still needs to go (knowledge of a fact), then it is only via its consciousness that it can come by this knowledge.

But [roombas] don't heal, grow, reproduce, or mutate. — Wayfarer

Nobody claimed they were life forms. But I know. You're leaning on your proof-by-definition again, which as I just said above, just shows how language is typically used, and doesn't prove anything about the roomba not doing as much and more than many 'sentient' life forms.
The same tactic is employed by racists to 'prove' that moral obligations don't apply to the race of choice.

IMO I don't even think that we can say that one can 'know' something without a qualitative experience. — boundless

Well, 'qualitative' apparently is a word reserved for life forms, and since non-living things can know stuff (see roomba example just above), I must either disagree with the statement or disagree with all the definitions that are confined to life forms.

"The cold mountain is to the left" you labeled an indexical despite it not being dependent on who says it. — noAxioms

Well, yes it is. If we face each other, then if it is to my left, it is not to your left. It matter who says it. That's why it is called indexical. — Banno

It's actually a matter of coordinate system choice, and not on who says it. Any person can choose whatever coordinates he likes. For a given person, the coordinate system would be loosely suggested more by which way he faces than who he's with.

The problem with eternalism is: are those experiences (i.e. that 'time flows', the appearance of 'free will' etc) compatible with eternalism? — boundless

Again, the experience of both interpretations is identical, so if it isn't compatible with eternalism, then it isn't compatible with presentism either. Both have you experiencing flow of time. I have a hard time with free will since there's no way to detect it one way or another. It also seems to make no predictions.

In fact, as I said before, if we deny those 'raw' experiences, can we trust empirical knowledge?

Since the two interpretations are empirically identical, you cannot have knowledge of which is correct. So there's no empirical knowledge to trust when it comes to anything interpretational.

IIRC, Goedel's theorems showed that even in relatively simple mathematical structures you get true yet unprovable (within the structure) propositions.

Yes. It's really easy to show this. But our universe isn't composed of statements or determinations of halting or whatnot. It's simply run by rules, none of which seem to contradict its operation. A counterexample would help a lot.

So, you can't derive all mathematical truths by a set of arbitrary axioms.

Agree. How is this relevant since I'm not suggesting that all truths must be derived?

This clearly suggests that mathematics isn't 'invented' IMO

If it was invented, it wouldn't be fundamental, but rather supervening on this inventor. So no argument here either.

MUH can also be a non-realist view. — noAxioms
Interesting, however I'm not sure how to conceive it. — boundless

2+3 sums up to 5. That works whether those values are real or not. Some disagree.

I do believe that MUH is defective, however. Other than the problem of change, I also believe that things like consciousness, ethics, aesthetics and so on require more than just 'math'.

You mean you think those things require more than just 'particles'. You are incredulous about physicalism. I suppose MUH is typically spun as a foundation for physicalism.

since the roomba knows — noAxioms

begs the question i.e. assumes what needs to be proven.