The hard problem is understood by some precisely so that progress can't be made (so that nothing could count as progress.) — Yellow Horse

I would agree with this, there is a cultural aversion,and a tradition of non engagement. to engage at all is in some ways antisocial.

'I demand an objective explanation for stuff that only I have access to or am.' — Yellow Horse

I believe it is possible to create a rough sketch of a philosophical consciousness. But ultimately consciousness is something created from DNA, experience, and perspective, so personal.Only you can understand your own personal consciousness as only you have full access to it.

I'd argue toward a philosophical explanation of consciousness. The word 'materialistic' tends to mislead people into equally useless assumptions (of ineffable stuff we can't be objective about). — Yellow Horse

There are many problems.
Another word for consciousness, though not entirely accurate, is sanity.
What if we made progress in our understanding of consciousness such that it caused a shift in our sanity? What if this shift caused a misalignment with the sanity of our family, friends, and culture?
Would you still go there?

On the other hand, is the sanity of our culture functional or dysfunctional?

Well I have direct (personal) experience of the 17 gods who created our world. Is that an 'ultimate proof' of my 17-god theology? — Yellow Horse

It's the ultimate proof for your consciousness. You know, I asked a question on this forum on why so many deny consciousness and many people argued that this is not the case and that nobody actually argues about that. Well, reading some comments here shows they were wrong.

The hard problem is understood by some precisely so that progress can't be made (so that nothing could count as progress.) — Yellow Horse

That sounds like a poor excuse for the incapacity of materialism.

I have a direct experience, that's an ultimate proof. — Eugen

Floats your lil rowboat but not mine. I'm interested in the grounds for doubt or belief, not "proof" (ultimate or otherwise). :roll:

I have a direct experience, that's an ultimate proof.
— Eugen
Floats your lil rowboat but not mine. I'm interested in the grounds for doubt or belief, not "proof" (ultimate or otherwise). :roll: — 180 Proof

If we cant trust experience, then what can we trust?

Floats your lil rowboat but not mine. I'm interested in the grounds for doubt or belief, not "proof" (ultimate or otherwise). — 180 Proof

Grounds are an illusion, they don't exist. It's a word invented by you and you don't exist, therefore ''grounds'' doesn't exist.
180 Proof - ''I am not interested in ''proof'' '' :rofl:

I just love when people simply want to debate the undebatable simply because they don't like the outcome. Materialists are like if Brazil, after losing 1-7 to Germany, went out and celebrated telling everyone they won the game. ''Reporter: You lost 7 to 1! Neymar: We are interested in the ''grounds'' of such an affirmation!'' :rofl:

Dear materialists, keep up with your wonderful adventure of finding arguments that consciousness does not exist, you are really good at it. Meanwhile we, the rest of the world, will focus on other things.

If we cant trust experience, then what can we trust? — Pop

Logic (i.e. sound inferential reasoning) to start. We also can - must - trust experience, but within limits.

Logic (i.e. sound inferential reasoning) to start. We also can - must - trust experience, but within limits. — 180 Proof

We have to start with experience - the emotional aspect of consciousness - as that is what creates our consciousness - what distinguishes us from zombies. Of course it should be balanced and fortified with reason.

Sorry to be a pedant, but its a reasonably important distinction.

A sense of consciousness (enabling modern English speakers to coherently use the word "conscious" and perhaps pre-moderns the word "sentient") arises from our ability to think and talk in symbols, which leads us to continually (and generally harmlessly) confuse three different things:

• thoughts (brain shivers)
• symbols (words and pictures)
• other objects (things and scenery)

The confusion may be fleeting, or persist into our thinking and talking about the inter-relation of the three.

By "confusion" I mean a semantic association subject to severe or recurring doubt and revision: hence, a cognitive process attending to its own attitude of choosing among symbols, and hence quite possibly conscious, in the sense here proposed.

Confusion of this general sort may be so tangled as to be rarely if ever resolved. Indeed, a symptom of its intractability could be the fact that we fail to recognise it as a confusion, but develop instead various culturally specific narratives that purport to explain (and do at least reinforce) certain sub-types of the confusion. For example, "ideas", "mind's eye", "inner voice", "qualia" etc. (Which may of course serve useful cognitive functions.)

In turn, these vectors of public (but partial) recognition of common varieties of confusion, in human processing of symbols, may facilitate the coherent, if problematic, usage of the word "conscious" found in modern society. In particular, I suggest that the overall notion of symbolic confusion serves to identify those features of an artificial intelligence that would convince most people (most competent users of "conscious") of that machine's consciousness; including most people sympathetic (like me) to Searle's "Chinese Room" critique of the Turing Test, and even perhaps some people susceptible to the notion of "philosophical zombies".

Searle showed that common usage of "conscious" implies that a conscious person has a "proper semantics": an ability to connect words not only with semantically related words, but with things out in the world. Since AI robotic machines are even now only beginning to learn to predict the trajectories of balls or sticks cast into a relatively small world, it's hardly surprising that most people will not yet be willing to grant them a "proper semantics", if that means an ability to predict the (imaginary) trajectories of words cast (as it were) into a relatively vast world.

On the other hand, there seems no special obstacle in the way of increasingly powerful neural network machines being set towards that task, and making the same kind of smooth (and internally somewhat mysterious) progress displayed by similar machines allowed to train in all sorts of skills, from playing games of strategy to painting pictures or composing music. Now, we don't feel inclined to attribute consciousness to those machines, and it seems to me that we might be similarly unimpressed by one that did somehow impress us as having Searle's "proper semantics" or "intentionality": at least under my interpretation of that notion as just sketched, i.e. an ability to learn the social game of pointing symbols (words and pictures) at things. On the contrary (to being impressed), we should, I imagine, be ready to dismiss such a machine as a "zombie", in the straight forward sense of it being, like a smart phone, an unconscious or "mere" machine, not tempting us to infer the presence of a "ghost" inside.

This scenario, in which we easily intuit a lack of consciousness in hypothetical machines that otherwise impress as capable of thought, leads many to the view that consciousness is inherently immune to an explanation merely in terms of patterns of thought. (And is fundamentally "harder".) I think that Searle's requirement of a proper semantics provides the needed specification of thought pattern, as long as it is couched in (the possibly un-Searlean) terms of the pointing of external rather than internal symbols, and is subject to the plausible expectation of those symbols getting habitually confused with thoughts and with the symbolised objects.

Imagine a machine capable of equivocating between e.g. its thought whilst momentarily looking at (or imagining or dreaming of) a tree, a picture of the tree, and the tree itself. The nature of such equivocation in the fleeting moment will require separate analysis; suffice here to suppose that, on subsequent introspection, the machine reports that its thought had consisted of a picture, or even of a tree. Perhaps by way of surprise or apology, either kind of entity is qualified as "mental" or "phenomenal", in which manner the machine has learnt that it may join with us in curious but apparently meaningful talk about such thoughts.

The machine's thought processes here strike me as conscious. Not, obviously, if it merely fakes the required kind of confusion: which for example it would need to if it lacked even a "proper" semantic connection of symbols to objects, confused or not; but which it might otherwise fake by learning to deceive us about the confusion. Not, either, if it really did have words or pictures in its head, like a camera or a pre-connectionist symbolic computer.

If I'm wrong, and the appropriately confused machine might still be unconscious, I need alerting towards features of my own conscious thoughts that I am leaving out of consideration. However, I don't think the usual claim of unreflective and immediate certainty will be one of those features. Indeed, the confusion hypothesis suggests a reason for that kind of claim: certainty arose in our assessment of the status of the tree itself, but we mistakenly ascribed it to our confused (e.g. pictorial) characterisation of our thoughts.

Whence the confusion? Maybe because skill in playing the social game of pointing symbols at things came so late after all the pragmatic and syntactic (e.g. musical) skills. Hazy on this.

I think Daniel Dennett made a decent effort towards explaining how materialism could give rise to consciousness in Consciousness Explained. I don’t agree with it but he certainly put forward a detailed framework - namely that many of the things we associate with consciousness such as a single coherent self and qualia are illusions and that we are nothing more than philosophical zombies - in the sense that we have no nonmaterial experiences and our cognitive processes are just more complex variations on what a computing system can carry out. To me, ultimately his notion of nonmaterial experiences doesn’t make sense. I think in the book he made some type of comparison of experience as nothing more than a cognitive mapping for easy reference of deeper cognitive programs akin to a desktop function on a computer. I think he did a pretty decent job of showing at the time (1991) how far science could be used to offer a possible explanation though ultimately falling short.

Yeah, phenomenalists pick on "illusion" as self-contradictory, and they have a point if it implies internal pictures?

Oh brother. Obviously at no point have I even given the appearance of arguing against the proposition that "cognitive science is deficient or invalid or broken"- a proposition which had not appeared til you typed it just now. I understand quite well what you're saying and feel like my own remarks have been pretty clear.. and so I've said all I mean to say on the idea that 400 years of philosophy of mind + an incredibly productive last few decades in neuroscience has amounted to "no actual progress on how non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness since Descartes" (a statement of dogma if ever there was one). — Enai De A Lukal

The fact that the gap between what is believed by materialists, and what is believed by idealists, continues to widen, is clear evidence that progress has not been made. The fact that the materialists ignore this evidence to claim that progress has been made, is simple denial. So the materialists float off in their self-induced bubble, further and further from the idealist perspective, while all the time claiming progress is being made in closing the gap between them.

The fact that the gap between what is believed by materialists, and what is believed by idealists, continues to widen, is clear evidence that progress has not been made. The fact that the materialists ignore this evidence to claim that progress has been made, is simple denial. So the materialists float off in their self-induced bubble, further and further from the idealist perspective, while all the time claiming progress is being made in closing the gap between them. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly! I am an outsider when it comes to philosophy and ideologies and I can say that I am shocked by the difference between my expectations and reality. I thought people who claim that they are lead by science are objective, open-minded, and ready to admit their failures. I was so naive.

There is no consensus that brains produce consciousness.

I thought people who claim that they are lead by science are objective, open-minded, and ready to admit their failures. — Eugen

Objectivity (insofar as it applies to investigation) is about dealing with shared phenomena, open-mindedness is only about accepting possibilities (not about choosing which to persue), and not yet having all the answers is not a failure in science, but rather the standard mode.

So what you're looking for to accommodate your need for your personal feelings on the matter to be investigated thoroughly and failure admitted when they are not resolved, is a therapist,not a scientist.

So what you're looking for to accommodate your need for your personal feelings on the matter to be investigated thoroughly and failure admitted when they are not resolved, is a therapist,not a scientist. — Isaac

If I find a therapist like you who denies consciousness, he'll need a surgeon to fix him )))

Nonetheless, they do. :roll: Rather, there's no consensus (merely having) a brain produces intelligence.

We're pretty sure Dark Matter is a particle of some sort. Dark Energy may be the energy of space itself. How does materialism even begin to explain how moving electrons across synaptic gaps in certain ways gives rise to conscious experience? The only things I've been seeing lately are vague handwavings about integrating information or lame attempts to define conscious experience out of existence. There's been no actual progress on how non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness since Descartes.

Since we've known that brains produce consciousness for a long time now, shouldn't we be closer to an actual explanation? At what point do we begin to question the premise "brains produce consciousness"? Do we reject it if there's no explanation in 100 years? 1,000 years? 10,000 years*?

*by then the question will no doubt be "Does X produce consciousness?" where X is whatever machine we've invented to replace brains. — RogueAI

You should have a look at Electrical Brain Stimulation (EBS)

A comprehensive review of EBS research compiled a list of many different acute impacts of stimulation depending on the brain region targeted. Following are some examples of the effects documented:[6]

Sensory: Feelings of body tingling, swaying, movement, suffocation, burning, shock, warmth, paresthesia, feeling of falling, oscillopsia, dysesthesia, levitation, sounds, phosphenes, hallucinations, micropsia, diplopia, etc.
Motor: Eye movements, locomotion, speech arrest, automatisms, laughter, palilalia, chewing, urge to move, crying without feeling sad, etc.
Autonomic: Blushing, mydriasis, change in blood pressure and breathing, apnea, nausea, tachycardia, sweating, etc.
Emotional: Anxiety, mirth, feeling of unreality, fear, happiness, anger, sadness, transient acute depression, hypomania, etc.
Cognitive: Acalculia, paraphasia, anomic aphasia, recalling memories, "going into a trance", "out of this world", conduction aphasia, hemispatial neglect, alexia, déjà vu, reliving past experiences, agraphia, apraxia, etc.
EBS in face-sensitive regions of the fusiform gyrus caused a patient to report that the faces of the people in the room with him had "metamorphosed" and became distorted: "Your nose got saggy, went to the left. [...] Only your face changed, everything else was the same." — Wikipedia

if EBS shows anything it's that many aspects of what we call consciousness can be elicited physically. What do you think this means for the nature of consciousness?

if EBS shows anything it's that many aspects of what we call consciousness can be elicited physically. What do you think this means for the nature of consciousness? — TheMadFool

It shows that we will be able to find out how consciousness arises, dissapears, and correlates with phisicsl states, it tells nothing about the 1st person experiences and it cannot explain how some electric signals or whatever they find can have a 1st person experiences.

It shows that we will be able to find out how consciousness arises, dissapears, and correlates with phisicsl states, it tells nothing about the 1st person experiences and it cannot explain how some electric signals or whatever they find can have a 1st person experiences — Eugen

Presumably all conscious aspects that were evoked by EBS were 1st person experiences related to the experimenters by the subject.

My earlier post notwithstanding, I have a vague idea as to how a materialistic account of consciousness fails. If I'm correct, the current scientific consensus is that the fundamental structural and functional unit of the nervous system is the neuron and that their primary mechanism is the action potential - an electrical wave that travels along the branches of the neuron. The problem I see is that there's no difference between the action potential in a skin neuron that senses pressure and an eye neuron that senses light - in fact, they're both essentially identical. Yes, an action potential from a pressure sensor on the skin and an action potential on a retinal neuron end up in different places - one in the somatosensory cortex and the other in the visual cortex - but these different brain centers themselves are essentially made up of neurons and thus will consist of the very same action potentials. In other words, a materialistic account of consciousness has to explain how what is a generic action potential becomes in one instant sound, light, pressure, etc. and that seems to be difficult considering all neurons, whatever their loci, are capable of are action potentials.

An action potential then constitutes a language with just one word, the signal travelling through a neuron, and to know what this signal means - a sound, a light, a taste, etc. - is another level of processing which I think brain function, because it itself consists of only action potentials traveling back and forth between neurons, is incapable of. Something else is processing the signals into the different perceptions of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.

Imagine a language, call it L, that has only ONE word, "signal". Imagine then that there are two people who speak this language, me, a translator, and you to whom anything translated is passed on to for comprehension. Suppose also that you know no other language except the language L. Now, if I were to translate the Bible into the language L, it would consist of strings of one word exactly, the word "signal", If I were then to let you read this L language translation of the Bible, you'd be confused as hell, no? It's impossible for you to understand the Bible or any other book for that matter if the only language you speak is the one-word language L.

PS: It appears that the brain distinguishes between the various senses based on which sets of neurons are activated. There is no need for just one part of the brain, as I had assumed, to distinguish between the various signals as one type or another. For instance, the eye is stimulated only by light and so even though action potentials in the eye are no different from those from the ear, that the eye is only stimulated by light and the ear only by sound is enough to make the distinction between these various sensory perceptions.

Presumably all conscious aspects that were evoked by EBS were 1st person experiences related to the experimenters by the subject. — TheMadFool

That makes absolutely no difference in terms of the hard problem. See, this is the problem with materialism. They postulate all kind of information that's never really related to the core issue, but they claim it is. It isn't. Other times they simply say there is no hard problem.
Again... if materialism is true, absolutely every question can be theoretically answered by physics. The problem is that your EBS and any other futuristic ultra-sophisticated technology will be able to answer only "how" things happen at the level of atoms and fields. But when asked about the intrinsic nature of consciousness, or why supposedly non-consciouss matter produces 1st person experience, or how is to feel something, etc., materialists have 2 answers:
1. These questions have no meaning, I have already shown you everything.
2. There is nothing intrinsic, it's all an illusion.

This is why I think materialism cannot go too far.

That makes absolutely no difference in terms of the hard problem. See, this is the problem with materialism. They postulate all kind of information that's never really related to the core issue, but they claim it is. It isn't. Other times they simply say there is no hard problem.
Again... if materialism is true, absolutely every question can be theoretically answered by physics. The problem is that your EBS and any other futuristic ultra-sophisticated technology will be able to answer only "how" things happen at the level of atoms and fields. But when asked about the intrinsic nature of consciousness, or why supposedly non-consciouss matter produces 1st person experience, or how is to feel something, etc., materialists have 2 answers:
1. These questions have no meaning, I have already shown you everything.
2. There is nothing intrinsic, it's all an illusion.

This is why I think materialism cannot go too far. — Eugen

What is this "intrinsic nature of consciousness"? Also, once the "how" has been answered, the explanation of consciousness in terms of the physical is complete, no?

What is this "intrinsic nature of consciousness"? Also, once the "how" has been answered, the explanation of consciousness in terms of the physical is complete, no? — TheMadFool

That's the point. No.
X#7366$€÷77_÷3663%#%#_77#_6#6# like equations or description of atom movemnts will never explain the "redness" of red. Just get over it and accept this reality.

That's the point. No.
X#7366$€÷77_÷3663%#%#_77#_6#6# like equations or description of atom movemnts will never explain the "redness" of red. Just get over it and accept this reality. — Eugen

What's so special about "redness"? If materialism is true then it's nothing more than the neurons connected to a certain subcategory of retinal cones being activated.

What's so special about "redness"? If materialism is true then it's nothing more than the neurons connected to a certain subcategory of retinal cones being activated. — TheMadFool

It is special because materialism cannot explain it. It is fundamentally different from the rest of things. Stating it isn't doesn't mean it isn't. It's just the confirmation of a fundamental limit of materialism.

Imagine an alien race having a feeling called zappiness, zappiness being a feeling only those aliens can experience. You could come up with tons of equations and neuron movements, you won't be able to really know what zappiness is.
This hurts materialists so much because their nice sand castle will be destroyed.
I totally understand your frustration, but you only confirm my affirmation:

1. These questions have no meaning, I have already shown you everything.
2. There is nothing intrinsic, it's all an illusion. — Eugen

In just a matter of few replys, you went from 1 to 2 and you will be stuck there forever.

Imagine an alien race having a feeling called zappiness, zappiness being a feeling only those aliens can experience. You could come up with tons of equations and neuron movements, you won't be able to really know what zappiness is. — Eugen

This reminds me of what I've been considering regarding the refutation of materialism with arguments like Mary's room. An explanation of something is in no way that something. I can explain the process of digestion with the physical theory of enzymes, etc. but the explanation is clearly not the actual process of digestion, right? Likewise, the visual perception of redness can be explained in physical terms but that explanation is obviously not going to be anything like actually seeing red. To think an explanation is the same thing as that which is being explained is preposterous. One is providing causal basis for a certain phenomena, evidently distinct from the phenomena themselves.

To think an explanation is the same thing as that which is being explained is preposterous. One is providing causal basis for a certain phenomena, evidently distinct from the phenomena themselves. — TheMadFool

Exactly!!!

Exactly!!! — Eugen

So, you agree that there's nothing wrong with materialism then? After all, the way you argued your position, everything depended on explanations having to evoke the experiences the explanation was about.

No explanation is that which is being explained but that's a given.

So, you agree that there's nothing wrong with materialism then? After all, the way you argued your position, everything depended on explanations having to evoke the experiences the explanation was about. — TheMadFool

Not so fast my friend!
First of all, observing how things work and not what they are is called science, not materialism, and that I have nothing against it.
But I do have something against materialism:

then it's nothing more than the neurons connected to a certain subcategory of retinal cones being activated. — TheMadFool

That's not consistent with

One is providing causal basis for a certain phenomena, evidently distinct from the phenomena themselves. — TheMadFool

So finding correlations is not the same thing with consciousness itself. So science', and not materialism, is the one that finds correlations between certain first person experiences and physical manifestation.
Materialism says that either:
1. Things with no purpose, no will, no first person experience cannot create something with first person experience, therefore consciousness doesn't exist - STUPID
2. Things with no purpose, no will, no first person experience can create something with first person experience - good luck explaining that!

I think your issue is that you don't make the fundamental difference between science and materialism.

1. Things with no purpose, no will, no first person experience cannot create something with first person experience, therefore consciousness doesn't exist - STUPID
2. Things with no purpose, no will, no first person experience can create something with first person experience - good luck explaining that! — Eugen

I disagree with 1. As for 2, all I'm going to say is that there's no need to posit something non-physical

:up: