The signals which chemosensory neurons send to cotices higher in the hierarchy. Nothing more. Beyond that you start to see the influence of a whole slew of non-chemosensory systems getting involved, feeding back to the chemosensory neurons, suppressing certain signals, re-iterating others. One if the many paths taken ends up (together with input from a hundred other unrelated paths) in the stimulation of the motor neurons responsible for forming the words "this tea tastes bitter". Where in all that is the 'taste' of the tea? — Isaac

Indeed, but yet we have an experience of tasting the tea. That's the hard problem.

To quite the contrary, I would call it a failed philosophical attempt at taking proper account of what conscious experience consists of and/or is existentially dependent upon. A failed attempt at setting out the pre-theoretical, basic, and/or fundamental elements of conscious experience. — creativesoul

Oh okay. I misunderstood. I agree that illusionism fails in this regard. And Dennett is sometimes hard to pin down, but I think he has outright supported illusionism at times, even though he says he doesn't deny consciousness. Because for him, consciousness is completely explainable in functional terms. It only seems like it's something more to us.

But that seeming just won't go away so easily.

Indeed, but yet we have an experience of tasting the tea. That's the hard problem. — Marchesk

We don't. That's the easy solution.

We don't. That's the easy solution. — Isaac

So you outright deny that we have conscious experiences. How does that work for you? You tell yourself it's only seems like there is a taste of tea when you sip?

To be fair, I have a few times tried to believe this upon reading some well argued paper, but I always go back to the warm embrace of the hard problem. That seeming is bloody hard to dismiss.

Do you think the taste of the tea is an experience that stands on its own? By "on its own", I mean not in distinction from all the other taste experiences you've had or expect.

I'm just thinking that taste, like color, is this little system that allows distinguishing one facet of your experience from another, one sort of experience from another. We label different ways of making these distinctions, but it could be we're not so much noting "red" as a sort of plenum, complete unto itself, but just tracking differences, changes in what's going on with us.

I know I'm not expressing this well, but I think you've spent more time on this stuff than I have, so maybe you can see what I'm getting at.

That makes sense. Somehow conscious experience arises from discrimination. That might be a clue. If it's possible to break down all the discriminations to some fundamental level which could possibly be shown to be produced by whatever neural activity or function it's performing.

I don't know, just thinking about how one might try to approach explaining consciousness. Somehow you have to show how the act of discriminating becomes a conscious sensation.

Then again, maybe it happens with the integration of the various discriminations into a unified experience that is the center of attention. It still seems like trying to marry two fundamentally different categories. One for objective observation and one for subjective experience. But maybe it can be done?

I want sugar added because I've learned such an action changes my internal states in a way that seems desirable
— Isaac

What internal states? How do you sense that it is desirable? How do you know that it will be again?
— Luke

Those are both massive questions. Short answer neural networks and predictive models. Perhaps if you could explain the relevance I could be.more specific, as it is you've just asked me for a précis of the whole of cognitive psychology. — Isaac

You mean to tell me you didn't notice that adding sugar changed your internal states in a desirable way until you learned about neural networks and predictive models? Did adding sugar have zero effect on your internal states before that?

Can you read this? Can you see this writing? If so, does it appear to have any colour?

Somehow you have to show how the act of discriminating becomes a conscious sensation. — Marchesk

But maybe that just is consciousness, not immediately, not straight from the senses, but the continual updating of your model of a world of objects. That sounds pretty close to what we'd expect a conscious organism to be doing, responding to change in a way that enables planning. Is there an alternative that doesn't require a Cartesian theater?

Does tea have some taste for you?
— Luke

No. — Isaac

I can taste tea. I don't believe there is a thing which answers to 'the taste of tea'. — Isaac

You appear to have changed your opinion between these two quotes. Otherwise, I don't understand the distinction. You can taste tea but it has no taste?

I think he's saying the taste of tea isn't like a coin you drop in the slot on a machine and then it does something. The way we interface with and interact with our environment is way more complicated than that.

You still have

But maybe that just is consciousness, not immediately, not straight from the senses, but the continual updating of your model of a world of objects. That sounds pretty close to what we'd expect a conscious organism to be doing, responding to change in a way that enables planning. Is there an alternative that doesn't require a Cartesian theater? — Srap Tasmaner

Except that you're just substituting "continual updating of your model of a world of objects" for the world of sensory objects and feels we experience. Somehow that updating of the model has to lead to colors, pains, etc. Computer simulations can continuously update their models and we don't take that as evidence for consciousness. There is nothing it's like to be a computer program, at least none we've created so far. That is to say, computer models don't have sensations. They don't see a colored in world, feel the coldness of the wind, smell the fragrance of flowers, feel the heaviness of a long workout in their joints.

Something has to make the model feel. Breathe life into the algorithms, if you will.

I'm not entirely in agreement with Dennett, because I'm not a physicalist, and for good reason. However, he has successfully rendered the conventional notion of Qualia false at best, and devoid of content at worst. He showed that it is an accounting malpractice.

Somehow that updating of the model has to lead to colors, pains — Marchesk

What I want to say is, I hope not!

If objects are discriminated in my modeling of the world based on visual information, that aspect of object formation or object identification just is what I think of as "color". @Isaac probably has a way better handle on this than I do, but I would guess there's awareness as we understand it just in case something goes wrong and system 2 needs to get involved. Awareness is just kept in the loop, so to speak. Stuff system 2 can't do anything about anyway is never included in that briefing (autonomic functions), and on occasion things might be going so predictably that system 1 skips some updates -- like when I'm driving home from work and sometimes find that I have successfully driven a few miles with my thoughts elsewhere.

Okay, so back to "I hope not". Since color is at most a side effect of my unconscious model-building, there's no reason to think I have any way of processing colors themselves, if I somehow received them as input. Do you see what I mean? Color as I know it, is part of the object discriminating process I'm constantly engaged in while awake, completely bound up with the functioning of my visual systems. There's nothing there that deals with colors, just stuff that, throughout my interaction with my environment, leaves behind what I think of as colors.

This is my argument but even I'm having trouble imagining it! Maybe I can describe it this way: you know how people like to color-code things? Or how a kids toy piano does each of the keys in an octave a different color to make it easier to spot them and remember them. Color as we think of it should turn out to be itself a sort of color-coding. We combine the "testimony" of our various senses in our object models, but since the sources combined are orthogonal and can give rise to different sorts of possible actions, we tag the contribution each source is making, and the part of the object sourced visually is tagged by what we think of as color. But what matters for color-coding is just the system of differences, and that it is orthogonal to the tagging used for the other senses, so we can match appropriate possible actions to our environment. (Something's color doesn't tell us how much it weighs, for instance; we'll use our proprioception for that, gauging the resistance we experience when we try to lift or move it, that sort of thing.)

computer models don't have sensations. They don't see a colored in world, feel the coldness of the wind, smell the fragrance of flowers, feel the heaviness of a long workout in their joints. — Marchesk

I think maybe we don't really either, not in the way typically imagined. I want to say what has to be avoided to start with is an image of experience that is at all static. Empiricists have this model of experience as chopped into a long string of instants -- your visual field is like this, then this, then this, and you have to make these inductive leaps to tie it all together into any kind of coherence. But there's nothing like this really going on, is there? We are, while awake, in constant multifaceted contact with our environment and processing an unending stream of data which we constantly project into the future and take action on. All of these point-like experiences we seem to construct retrospectively, I'm not at all sure anything quite like that is ever actually happening. Feeling the sun and the wind is bound up with all the rest of the process of living, testing, responding, projecting. We never stand still long enough for any sort of input to become present to us in this revealed sort of way; we're already involved with whatever it is, expecting it, seeking it, avoiding it, using it, regretting it, whatever. We're really nothing at all like cameras, you know?

Bleh. I'm way out of my depth but felt like rambling. Maybe you'll see something in here somewhere worth responding to.

We're really nothing at all like cameras, you know? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't know that this is a fact... Our eyes resemble cameras quite a lot. They have an aperture, a lense and a photosensitive surface on which the image is captured.

If you are not color-blind, you can distinguish a green from a red, or a dark red from a light red, or a movie in colors from a movie in black and white. How you spot the difference, if not through some qualitative difference in what you see?

So you outright deny that we have conscious experiences. How does that work for you? You tell yourself it's only seems like there is a taste of tea when you sip? — Marchesk

Yes. It's not that hard to catch oneself storytelling, in fact it's quite a common therapeutic technique to do so. That's why I think you really need to engage with the text here, Dennet's arguments are doing exactly that and it's pointless me repeating them here. I assume you've read them, so apart from the overall "Nah!" that is obvious we're not going to make any more progress until you pick up on one of them and say exactly why it doesn't work for you.

There really does only seem to be a taste of tea, Dennet takes us through step by step how what we'd like to think is the taste of tea is not what it seems. I've added a bit of gloss from modern cognitive psychology, but, as I said right at the beginning, Dennet's argument is that our intuitions are mistaken, so it's pointless responding to that with reference to those same intuitions.

Dennet's argument is that our intuitions are mistaken, — Isaac

That could explain why Dennett rarely makes any sense: his intuitions are simply mistaken.

You mean to tell me you didn't notice that adding sugar changed your internal states in a desirable way until you learned about neural networks and predictive models? Did adding sugar have zero effect on your internal states before that? — Luke

I really don't understand what this question has to do with the answer I gave you. You asked me why people add sugar, I gave you an (admittedly behaviourist) answer I could have answered in neurological terms, evolutionary terms, endocrinological terms... What perspective did you want the answer from?

I think he's saying the taste of tea isn't like a coin you drop in the slot on a machine and then it does something. The way we interface with and interact with our environment is way more complicated than that. — Srap Tasmaner

Exactly. I'm trying to explain the difference between there being 'a taste of tea' and the process of tasting tea. We're not going to make any progress if you don't engage with that distinction - do you understand it, do you find it implausible (if so, why) do you find it plausible but it doesn't answer your concerns (again, if so, why)? Your incredulity that I could think this way is noted. It's not, in itself, an argument. If you think me an idiot, then there's little point in continuing a discussion, If you don't then there's obviously something there to be unravelled isn't there, so that might be an interesting thing to do, no?

As a general principle - if you really think what I'm saying is the equivalent of me saying there's purple jellyfish on the moon, then why engage at all, I'm obviously a lunatic? If not, then it doesn't help to just restate your incredulity.

Can you read this? Can you see this writing? If so, does it appear to have any colour? — Luke

It appears to be black. As I just said to Marchesk, there's little point in arguing against a essay suggesting our intuitions are incoherent by just referring back to our intuitions. We know our intuitions are often that objects have sensory properties (this writing is black). Dennet's just written an essay showing how those intuitions don't hold up to analysis, they're inconsistent in certain cases which shows them to be at the very least in need of modification. What we know about how the brain works supports Dennet's view. It's no good re-telling us that we do indeed have intuitions that objects have sensory properties, that's where the whole inquiry begins, we move on from there to explore some of the problems with that intuition.

I think he's saying the taste of tea isn't like a coin you drop in the slot on a machine and then it does something. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not saying that either. I'm just trying to get people to admit that they do, in fact, taste tea when they drink it. Non-qualists seem very reluctant to admit it.

The way we interface with and interact with our environment is way more complicated than that. — Srap Tasmaner

Depends which way you look at it. I take a sip of tea and taste it almost immediately. I don't need to know what's happening from a neurological or any other standpoint to have it seem that particular way. Scientific knowledge might help me to understand why it seems a particular way on a particular occasion, and that knowledge might even change how it would otherwise seem (without the knowledge), due to expectations. But it's still going to seem a particular way (barring exceptions).

This was the reason for my reference to cerebral achromatopsia in the article. Unless subject's reports are taken seriously - that they do, in fact, "see bright blue objects as black", for example - then what would cerebral achromatopsia even mean? @Isaac would have us believe that it can only be about what subjects say - about their verbal reports (or behaviour) alone. How things seem to a subject is supposedly irrelevant (or even non-existent). But if how things seem to a subject is irrelevant, then why elicit responses from subjects about how things seem to them? What if they were to answer only in, e.g., neurological terms? It would be like taking part in this discussion.

You asked me why people add sugar — Isaac

No, I asked why you add sugar.

What perspective did you want the answer from? — Isaac

Yours.

As I just said to Marchesk, there's little point in arguing against a essay suggesting our intuitions are incoherent by just referring back to our intuitions. — Isaac

What if we remain unconvinced by (or just want to question) the article and its implications? For example, does the article say or imply that we don't really see colours or taste tea? Does it say or imply that tea doesn't have a particular flavour or that red doesn't have a particular colour? Does it say or imply that we should jettison talk of qualia altogether, or that we should no longer trust our intuitions on these matters? Maybe I've misunderstood the point of this discussion.

I'm trying to explain the difference between there being 'a taste of tea' and the process of tasting tea. — Isaac

If there are philosophers who imagine qualia as discrete packets of sense data, I don't know who they are. It's not a mainstream view, and I don't think that was really the idea Dennett was trying to undermine with this essay. I think he was trying to show that qualia is beyond our grasp in an externalist context, along the lines of what Quine did with reference.

So I think if Dennett was the Alps, most of the discussion in this thread has been in the Andes. A strawman has been destroyed. What we actually mean by phenomenal consciousness, experience, or qualia, remains.

There really does only seem to be a taste of tea, Dennet takes us through step by step how what we'd like to think is the taste of tea is not what it seems. I've added a bit of gloss from modern cognitive psychology, but, as I said right at the beginning, Dennet's argument is that our intuitions are mistaken, so it's pointless responding to that with reference to those same intuitions. — Isaac

There are our intuitions about our sensations, and then there are our sensations given to us in experience. I saw colored objects and tasted tea long before I knew anything about qualia. And I even noticed that my taste of certain foods or drink changed over time.

Seeing a colored in world isn't an intuition. It just is there in your visual field. Same with tasting tea. Reflecting on the nature of those sensations is where intuitions start to come in to play.

It's no good re-telling us that we do indeed have intuitions that objects have sensory properties, that's where the whole inquiry begins, we move on from there to explore some of the problems with that intuition. — Isaac

There is a potential epistemic minefield in this approach. If we can't trust our sensations to be real, why trust that there is a material world at all? Empiricism is based on investigating phenomena, but those phenomena appear to us as having colors, making sounds, etc.

I'm not entirely in agreement with Dennett, because I'm not a physicalist, and for good reason. However, he has successfully rendered the conventional notion of Qualia false at best, and devoid of content at worst. He showed that it is an accounting malpractice. — creativesoul

Even if Dennett does so for the ineffable, intrinsic, direct, private definition of qualia, it still leaves sensations to be explained. And not just for perception, but all conscious mental activity, only some of which is made public to others through language or behavioral inferences.

And that's why I think Dennett ultimately ends up espousing or implying some form of illusionism in other talks or papers he's written. It should be noted that He did use to defend skepticism about dreams, claiming that we only come-to-seem-to-remember upon awakening. Because dreams present a similar problem, perhaps an even more difficult one for physicalism, since dream content isn't based on perceiving an external world.

But dream research since then has supported dreaming as an activity that happens while you sleep, not something invented as you wake up (or at least not always). And lucid dreaming is a thing.

The consciousness debate seems to mostly revolve around perception for some reason, but consciousness isn't limited to that. If you can daydream while driving a car, what is going on in Dennett's account?

We never stand still long enough for any sort of input to become present to us in this revealed sort of way; we're already involved with whatever it is, expecting it, seeking it, avoiding it, using it, regretting it, whatever. We're really nothing at all like cameras, you know? — Srap Tasmaner

Well, one can meditate and focus on a particular sensation or object for a time.

I think maybe we don't really either, not in the way typically imagined. I want to say what has to be avoided to start with is an image of experience that is at all static. Empiricists have this model of experience as chopped into a long string of instants -- your visual field is like this, then this, then this, and you have to make these inductive leaps to tie it all together into any kind of coherence. But there's nothing like this really going on, is there? We are, while awake, in constant multifaceted contact with our environment and processing an unending stream of data which we constantly project into the future and take action on. All of these point-like experiences we seem to construct retrospectively, I'm not at all sure anything quite like that is ever actually happening. Feeling the sun and the wind is bound up with all the rest of the process of living, testing, responding, projecting. — Srap Tasmaner

Sure, it's dynamic. Perhaps some of the traditional intuitions of qualia are flawed because of not taking this into account?

Being a relation still involves a combination of, or an interaction between, a subject and an object(s). Object(s) are still filtered/perceived by the subject (or by the subject's brain/body) in a way unique to that brain/body, even if colour or sweetness are labelled as objective properties. If there were no subjective aspect, then you should expect to find that we all have the same subjective (objective?) experiences. However, many of Dennett's examples demonstrate that this is not the case. For example, the case of cerebral achromatopsia in which a subject reports that "everything looked black or grey". I have never had this type of experience before. If colour is an objective property then why does the subject report seeing (e.g.) "bright blue objects as black"? — Luke

The thing with colour etc being characterised as extrinsic relational properties means they don't collapse down to either being subjective or objective. A subjective state of colour is "in" your mind. An objective state of colour is "in" the perceived object. Characterising colour as a relational property makes it neither wholly in the head nor wholly in the object, it's a property of the relationship between the two of them.

If you're thinking of "the subjective state of colour" as "a perceptual relationship between a subject and an object" which "only the perceiving subject has access to", which "isn't an objective property of the perceived object" and which "is a property of the subjective state", that's not characterising colour as extrinsic and relational, that's characterising colour as private ("only the perceiving subject has access to") and non-relational ("is a property of the subjective state"). It's as if upon characterising perception as a relationship between a subject and an object, the properties of the relationship have been moved inside the subject. Rather than having those properties of perceptual events being of the relationship between the agent ("subject") and their environment ("object") and occurring in same scope as environmental and bodily events.

Dennett and the interviewer here talk a bit about the relationship of Dennett's criticism of qualia and undermining the subject-object distinction. Undermining it, not collapsing it to one side.

@Isaac@Kenosha Kid@Marchesk

So back to the paper, there's some skepticism regarding first order properties of qualia in intuition pump #1 - targeted at their conditions of individuation. But he's also going to throw shade on the second order properties of qualia. Those second order properties are:

What is special about qualia? Traditional analyses suggest some fascinating second-order properties of these properties. First, since one cannot say to another, no matter how eloquent one is and no matter how cooperative and imaginative one's audience is, exactly what way one is currently seeing, tasting, smelling and so forth, qualia are ineffable--in fact the paradigm cases of ineffable items. According to tradition, at least part of the reason why qualia are ineffable is that they are intrinsic properties--which seems to imply inter alia that they are somehow atomic and unanalyzable. Since they are "simple" or "homogeneous" there is nothing to get hold of when trying to describe such a property to one unacquainted with the particular instance in question.

Moreover, verbal comparisons are not the only cross-checks ruled out. Any objective, physiological or "merely behavioral" test--such as those passed by the imaginary wine-tasting system-- would of necessity miss the target (one can plausibly argue), so all interpersonal comparisons of these ways-of-appearing are (apparently) systematically impossible. In other words, qualia are essentially private properties. And, finally, since they are properties of my experiences (they're not chopped liver, and they're not properties of, say, my cerebral blood flow--or haven't you been paying attention?), qualia are essentially directly accessible to the consciousness of their experiencer (whatever that means) or qualia are properties of one's experience with which one is intimately or directly acquainted (whatever that means) or "immediate phenomenological qualities" (Block, 1978) (whatever that means). They are, after all, the very properties the appreciation of which permits us to identify our conscious states. So, to summarize the tradition, qualia are supposed to be properties of a subject's mental states that are...

(1) ineffable - one cannot transmit a quale over the information channels of language, and being in the same functional, behavioural or intentional state as another in the same circumstance does not count as bearing the same quale.
(2) intrinsic - eliciting (an instance of) the quale requires having an experience which bears it, one only "has access" to the quale when one is having (or has had) an experience generative of it,
(3) private - interpersonal comparison of first order experience properties is systematically impossible (Dennett's cauliflower taste != other person's cauliflower taste)
(4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness - the first order properties (the taste of cauliflower) are what is presented to consciousness.

Dennett puts those second order properties in the context of a distinction with intentional, dispositional and functional properties:

The specialness of these properties is hard to pin down, but can be seen at work in intuition pump #2: the wine-tasting machine. Could Gallo Brothers replace their human wine tasters with a machine? A computer-based "expert system" for quality control and classification is probably within the bounds of existing technology. We now know enough about the relevant chemistry to make the transducers that would replace taste buds and olfactory organs (delicate color vision would perhaps be more problematic), and we can imagine using the output of such transducers as the raw material--the "sense data" in effect--for elaborate evaluations, descriptions, classifications. Pour the sample in the funnel and, in a few minutes or hours, the system would type out a chemical assay, along with commentary: "a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina"--or words to such effect. Such a machine might well perform better than human wine tasters on all reasonable tests of accuracy and consistency the winemakers could devise Endnote 3, but surely no matter how "sensitive" and "discriminating" such a system becomes, it will never have, and enjoy, what we do when we taste a wine: the qualia of conscious experience! Whatever informational, dispositional, functional properties its internal states have, none of them will be special in the way qualia are. If you share that intuition, you believe that there are qualia in the sense I am targeting for demolition.

I bolded the sense data bit, it's construing sense data as the output of senses to discriminatory systems - distinct from construing sense data as perceptual features presented to consciousness, as perceptual features are formed in an interaction between how the environment+body is sensorially sampled and discriminatory systems.

What is special about qualia? Traditional analyses suggest some fascinating second-order properties of these properties.

The claim seems to be: qualia (as Dennett is attacking) are a distinct type of property from intentional, dispositional and functional properties of internal states. Those four second order properties are treated as the distinguishing features of qualia from intentional, dispositional and functional properties.

Let's try not to get trapped in the Motte and Bailey situation Dennett describes:

My challenge strikes some theorists as outrageous or misguided because they think they have a much blander and hence less vulnerable notion of qualia to begin with. They think I am setting up and knocking down a strawman, and ask, in effect: "Who said qualia are ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly apprehensible ways things seem to one?" Since my suggested fourfold essence of qualia may strike many readers as tendentious, it may be instructive to consider, briefly, an appparently milder alternative: qualia are simply "the qualitative or phenomenal features of sense experience( s ), in virtue of having which they resemble and differ from each other, qualitatively, in the ways they do." (Shoemaker, 1982, p. 367) Surely I do not mean to deny those features!

I reply: it all depends on what "qualitative or phenomenal" comes to. Shoemaker contrasts qualitative similarity and difference with "intentional" similarity and difference-- similarity and difference of the properties an experience repre sents or is "of". That is clear enough, but what then of "pheno menal"? Among the non-intentional (and hence qualitative?) properties of my visual states are their physiological properties. Might these very properties be the qualia Shoemaker speaks of? It is supposed to be obvious, I take it, that these sorts of features are ruled out, because they are not "accessible to introspection" (Shoemaker, private correspondence). These are features of my visual state, perhaps, but not of my visual experience. They are not phenomenal properties.

in the thread any more. In terms of the paper, we're trying to look at whether it's appropriate to distinguish qualia from functional, intentional and dispositional properties. No one wants to deny that people can taste coffee.

The thing with colour etc being relational properties means they don't collapse down to either being subjective or objective. A subjective state of colour is "in" your mind. An objective state of colour is "in" the perceived object. Characterising colour as a relational property makes it neither wholly in the head nor wholly in the object, it's a property of the relationship between the two of them. — fdrake

The problem with this is that we can have color experiences independent of perception.m, such as in dreams or by directly stimulating the visual cortex.

The problem with this is that we can have color experiences independent of perception.m, such as in dreams or by directly stimulating the visual cortex. — Marchesk

You can have coloured features in dreams without the same flavour and intensity of sensorimotor feedbacks we have when conscious, that's not quite the same thing as perceptual feedbacks between agent and environment. Nor does the fact that we dream establish that the coloured features in dreams are not functional, intentional or dispositional properties of those states. Can your dreams have a visual component if your brain patterns are far removed from representing colour patterns, eg if you've been born blind or become blind at an early age? Probably not:

Perhaps due to the highly visual nature of dreaming, people always have wondered if blind people dream, so some of the earliest systematic interview studies on dreams dealt with this topic, showing that people who are born blind or become blind before age 4 or 5 years old do dream even though they do not see images in their dreams,91 a finding that was then supported by laboratory studies.92,93 Nor is there much if any difference in dream content, except that there may be less aggression in their dreams.11,91

That blindness sufficiently early in a person's development can screen off visual imagery from being present in dreams suggests that even though blind subjects may have had visual experiences, visual imagery in dreams - that is, the presence of "colour qualia" in dreams - depends upon the functional characteristics of a person's sensorimotor systems and how that information is currently processed. "Functional", "how" - we're still in the scope of extrinsic relational properties. It's more likely to be the case that visual imagery in dreams occurs without the usual perceptual stimuli for vision, but that visual imagery in dreams is part of the functionality of the person's sensorimotor and discriminatory systems regardless.

You can have coloured features in dreams without the same flavour and intensity of sensorimotor feedbacks we have when conscious, that's not quite the same thing as perceptual feedbacks between agent and environment. — fdrake

Right, but the consciousness debate isn’t limited to perception, and the fact that other ways of stimulating the relevant brain circuits leads to conscious sensations locates those sensations in the brain. Also, I disagree that all non-perceptual states are less complex, It really depends on the brain and the experience. Some people are very good visualizers. Some can create music in their mind. Mental abilities and experiences range quite a bit. Take the right hallucinogenic and you can have very vivid color sensations.

It's more likely to be the case that visual imagery in dreams occurs without the usual perceptual stimuli for vision, but that visual imagery in dreams is part of the functionality of the person's sensorimotor and discriminatory systems regardless — fdrake

Probably so, but I don’t see how this makes the sensations extrinsic if it’s the brain circuitry that produces the sensations, not any other part of the perceptual process. So then we’re left debating whether the relevant functions or neurons are themselves conscious, as in some sort of identity.

Probably so, but I don’t see how this makes the sensations extrinsic if it’s the brain circuitry that produces the sensations, not any other part of the perceptual process. — Marchesk

It seems to indicate that a person will not have visual imagery in their dreams if they have not had sufficiently recent visual perceptions . Whether a property is Intrinsic/extrinsic, in the article, I think is ultimately a question of access to it, access to what type of access (epistemic, causal relation, questions of "transduction") and properties of those access types (infalliblity, privacy etc).

Regarding the transduction thing, here:

 There is no double transduction [5]. The various peripheral and internal transducers—rods and cones, hair cells, olfactory epithelium cells, stretch-detectors in muscles, temperature-change detectors, nociceptors and others—are designed by evolution to take the occurrence of physically detectable properties as input and yield signals—axonal spike trains—as output. There is no central arena or depot where these spike trains become recipes for a second transduction that restores the properties transduced at the periphery, or translates them into some sort of counterpart properties of a privileged medium. Vision is not television, audition does not strike up the little band in the brain, olfactory perception does not waft aromas in any inner chamber. (Nor, one had better add, are there subjective counterpart properties, subjective colours-that-are-not-seen-with-eyes, inaudible-sounds, ghost-aromas that need no molecular vehicles, for us to enjoy and identify in some intimate but unimaginable way.) Colour vision is accomplished by a sophisticated system of information processing conducted entirely in spike trains, where colours are ‘represented’ by physical patterns of differences in spike trains that are not themselves colours. The key difference between the transmission of colour information by a DVD and the transmission of colour information by the various cortical regions is that the former is designed by engineers to be a recipe for recreating (via a transduction to another medium) the very properties that triggered the peripheral transducers that compose the megapixel screens behind the camera lens, while the latter is designed by evolution to deliver useful information about the affordances that matter to the organism in a form that is readily usable or consumable [10] by the specialized circuits that modulate the behaviours of systems external and internal.

(ii) So, there is no place in the system for qualia, if they are conceived of as intrinsic properties instantiated by (as contrasted with represented by) some activities in the nervous system. — Dennett, Facing up to the hard question