Wasn't he one of the first to raise the logical contradiction of some theory trying to undermine the reality of human subjective experience, from which all knowledge and theories spring? — Olivier5
At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation, which seems immediate and obvious: I have a sensation of redness, of blueness, of hot or cold. It will, however, be seen that nothing could in fact be more confused, and that because they accepted it readily, traditional analyses missed the phenomenon of perception. — MMP
Pure sensation will be the experience of an undifferentiated, instantaneous, dotlike impact. It is unnecessary to show, since authors are agreed on it, that this notion corresponds to nothing in our experience, and that the most rudimentary factual perceptions that we are acquainted with, in creatures such as the ape or the hen, have a bearing on relationships and not on any absolute terms — "MMP
What counts as the way the juice tastes to x can be distinguished, one supposes, from what is a mere accompaniment, contributory cause, or byproduct of this "central" way. One dimly imagines taking such cases and stripping them down gradually to the essentials, leaving their common residuum, the way things look, sound, feel, taste, smell to various individuals at various times, independently of how those individuals are stimulated or non- perceptually affected, and independently of how they are subsequently disposed to behave or believe. The mistake is not in supposing that we can in practice ever or always perform this act of purification with certainty, but the more fundamental mistake of supposing that there is such a residual property to take seriously, however uncertain our actual attempts at isolation of instances might be. — Dennett
The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’. A really homogeneous area offering nothing to be cannot be given to any perception. The structure of actual perception alone can teach us what perception is. The pure impression is, therefore, not only undiscoverable, but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as an instant of perception.. — MMP
The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice. We think we know perfectly well what ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘sensing’ are, because perception has long provided us with objects which are coloured or which emit sounds. When we try to analyse it, we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what psychologists call ‘the experience error’, which means that what we know to be in things themselves we immediately take as being in our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end by understanding neither. — MMP
I suspect you also know something about your own mental phenomena, and this knowledge is based on a capacity for introspection. The distinction between knowing and sensing is weaker than you seem to think: you know because you sense. — Olivier5
And yes, mental phenomena are subjective by definition. But MRI of brains can detect emotions, so self-reporting is not the only tool we have to study these things. — Olivier5
I consider introspection as a sense.I know about my own mental phenomenon from introspection, — Merkwurdichliebe
Do we have direct access to anything?Either way, self reporting or MRI scans, neither give our senses direct access to mental states. — Merkwurdichliebe
The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice. We think we know perfectly well what ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘sensing’ are, because perception has long provided us with objects which are coloured or which emit sounds. When we try to analyse it, we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what psychologists call ‘the experience error’, which means that what we know to be in things themselves we immediately take as being in our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end by understanding neither.
— MMP — fdrake
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. — bongo fury
Then, I suppose, you don't subscribe to the five senses tradition. How many senses have you identified?I consider introspection as a sense. — Olivier5
Yes. To our own sensing, to our own perceiving, and to our own thinking. Everything else is always experienced indirectly - that is to say, anything that can be apprehended through those faculties must be mediated from what it is in-itself, to what it is for-me, viz. a sensation, a perception, or a thought.Do we have direct access to anything?
One need not deny the existence of sense data properties to deny that calling them qualia is of any use, or to deny that they then exhibit any of the additional properties associated with qualia. — Isaac
Third option; which I take to be Dennett's (then we can get back to the thread).
(1) People feel stuff. (Dennett agrees)
Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time... — Dennett — fdrake
If we say that someone is an eliminativist about qualia, that will mean they believe that qualia do not exist. Qualia the theoretical concept. That does not have to mean that "People feel stuff" is false, it simply means that the kind of thing qualia tries to refer to does not exist in the manner it is theorised or intuited. — fdrake
One need not deny the existence of sense data properties to deny that calling them qualia is of any use, or to deny that they then exhibit any of the additional properties associated with qualia. — Isaac
What distinction are you drawing between sense data properties and qualia? — Luke
You say that there are "additional properties associated with qualia", so what are the (non-additional) properties that you appear to indicate are shared by both sense data and qualia — Luke
I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time — Dennet
qualia are supposed to be properties of a subject's mental states that are
(1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness — Dennet
(sometimes a flag flaps in the wind, which sometimes catches a person's eye, which sometimes causes them to trip, which sometimes means they twist their ankle, which sometimes means they walk slower ,which sometimes means they miss their bus). We can draw a line from the flag to the missed bus, but we'd be considered insane to regularly talk of missed busses as being one of the properties of flags. — Isaac
Here I was referencing Dennet's position that... The additional properties being... — Isaac
I would go further to say that conscious experience does not have usefully definable properties at all. — Isaac
One need not deny the existence of sense data properties to deny that calling them qualia is of any use, or to deny that they then exhibit any of the additional properties associated with qualia. — Isaac
Where does he say that they are additional properties? In addition to what? — Luke
Traditional analyses suggest some fascinating second-order properties of these properties. — Dennet
And yet, you stated earlier:
One need not deny the existence of sense data properties to deny that calling them qualia is of any use, or to deny that they then exhibit any of the additional properties associated with qualia. — Isaac
Your position is that you don't need to deny sense data properties in order to deny qualia. But you deny sense data properties (without explaining the difference) anyway? Okay. — Luke
Thanks, good points. I'll read it again. I agree that Merleau-Ponty criticizes the concept of 'elementory' sensations with arguments similar to Dennett, but he does so from a very different perspective. He finds eliminativism intellectually dishonest and absurd. What he is trying to do is perceive perception, so as to improve his understanding of it, not to deny it.Another correspondence between the two thinkers in this context is the attitude of skepticism towards "pure impressions" - — fdrake
The idea here (as I faintly see it) is that the mind-body problem appears intractable if the body is seen as a dead machine, because a machine and a mind are too far apart, as Descartes noted. But the picture changes if the body is seen (as MMP does) as already intentional, already infused with information-for-the-purpose-of-living, information-with-intention. If this is the case then conscious perception can be seen as a mere extension of this fundamental biological tendency to "grab information for a purpose". The hiatus between a living body and its own consciousness is easier to bridge than between a dead machine and its ghost. So this perspective makes the hard problem a little less hard.1, because Merleau-Ponty takes biology seriously, unlike Popper for instance, who only thinks about physics as the 'queen science'. And biology imposes a whole series of constraints that can help understand the biological phenomena called "thoughts". Physics and chemistry are too distant from thoughts to offer much clues. Biology is much closer; brains are biological, and biology is most probably where a scientific resolution of the mind-body problem will come from, not quantum physics. — Olivier5
When we take in sensory inputs it sets off a large set of reactions in the brain, like a cascade. Most of those reactions are immediate feedback loops with the sensory apparatus themselves, the majority of which take place without any conscious awareness. Those that do have conscious awareness are always in review, post hoc constructions to model what just happened and prepare a response aimed at minimising the errors in that model. — Isaac
@Lukee.g. pictorial) characterisation of our thoughts — bongo fury
Intuition pump #1: watching you eat cauliflower. I see you tucking eagerly into a helping of steaming cauliflower, the merest whiff of which makes me faintly nauseated, and I find myself wondering how you could possible relish that taste, and then it occurs to me that to you, cauliflower probably tastes (must taste?) different. A plausible hypothesis, it seems, especially since I know that the very same food often tastes different to me at different times. For instance, my first sip of breakfast orange juice tastes much sweeter than my second sip if I interpose a bit of pancakes and maple syrup, but after a swallow or two of coffee, the orange juice goes back to tasting (roughly? exactly?) the way it did the first sip.
Surely we want to say (or think about) such things, and surely we are not wildly wrong when we do, so . . . surely it is quite OK to talk of the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t, and ask whether it is just the same as or different from the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t', or the way the juice tastes to Jones at time t.
This "conclusion" seems innocent, but right here we have already made the big mistake. The final step presumes that we can isolate the qualia from everything else that is going on--at least in principle or for the sake of argument.
)Kant characterizes synthesis as “the act of putting different representations (perceptions-me) together, and grasping what is manifold in them in one cognition” (A77/B103); it is a process that “gathers the elements for cognition, and unites them to form a certain content”
What counts as the way the juice tastes to x can be distinguished, one supposes, from what is a mere accompaniment, contributory cause, or byproduct of this "central" way. One dimly imagines taking such cases and stripping them down gradually to the essentials, leaving their common residuum, the way things look, sound, feel, taste, smell to various individuals at various times, independently of how those individuals are stimulated or non- perceptually affected, and independently of how they are subsequently disposed to behave or believe. The mistake is not in supposing that we can in practice ever or always perform this act of purification with certainty, but the more fundamental mistake of supposing that there is such a residual property to take seriously, however uncertain our actual attempts at isolation of instances might be.
quine, v. (1) To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant. "Some philosophers have quined classes, and some have even quined physical objects." Occasionally used intr., e.g., "You think I quine, sir. I assure you I do not!" (2) n. The total aggregate sensory surface of the world; hence quinitis, irritation of the quine.
The verb "to quine" is even more esoteric. It comes from The Philosophical Lexicon (Dennett 1978c, 8th edn., 1987), a satirical dictionary of eponyms: "quine, v. To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant." At first blush it would be hard to imagine a more quixotic quest than trying to convince people that there are no such properties as qualia; hence the ironic title of this chapter. But I am not kidding.
To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant
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