We're going round in circles here. You seem to want to insist on only using a language which makes mental functions as they seem to you the same as mental functions as they are. — Isaac

I don't insist on using language only this way. I have never said "this isn't how "awareness" is ordinarily used" about your use of the word. You are the one attempting to restrict language use and eliminate the first-person perspective in favour of the third-person perspective. OTOH, I am attempting to make room for both perspectives. It's a bit rich, then, that you should accuse me of attempting to eliminate the third-person perspective in favour of the first-person perspective.

Besides, to whom else can my mental functions (as opposed to my behaviour) seem a particular way? How else can I talk about how the location of my arm seems to me?

I you cannot find any language tools to differentiate then there's no point in discussing mental functions with other people at all, you already have 100% exhaustive and accurate knowledge of everything in the field, as do I. What possible benefit could us talking to each other about it possibly yield? — Isaac

We're not doing "the field" of neuroscience, we're doing philosophy. You might recall that the original point of our disagreement was whether or not subjectivity is private.

Your actual arm is in location X you report is as being in location Y so the signals leaving your actual arm are not accurately being represented to your conscious awareness. — Isaac

What I am conscious of is that my arm is in location Y. It is part of your own scenario that I am conscious of things seeming this particular way. If things didn't seem this way to me, I wouldn't be able to report it as such, which means that you wouldn't be able to describe this scenario or the inaccuracies of my reports (and then there would be little point in detecting brain lesions). You should acknowledge that this perspective is fundamental to your scenario.

My reports, of how things seem to me, are public. But you can never have the same (token of) experience of how things seem to me. You might even have the same type of lesion and give the same reports, but you can't access or research whether our experiences feel the same (unless you have an argument to present to demonstrate that you can). As I said prior to us becoming sidetracked by your claims that I make inferences about my own sensations, and that I am consciously aware of signals being sent from my thalamus:

You don't see someone scream in agony and also see their pain sensation, do you? So how do you verify a person's sensations? Do you have anything more than inferences from their behaviour? — Luke

If not, then why shouldn't a sensation/feeling/experience, which is inaccessible to others, be called private (in that sense)?

We're not doing "the field" of neuroscience, we're doing philosophy. You might recall that the original point of our disagreement was whether or not subjectivity is private. — Luke

The field is immaterial, the point is that if the way things seem to you is a sacrosanct model of the way things actually are then there's there's nothing to discuss. It would be no different in pure philosophy. If we were discussing universals and you said "It seems to me that there are universals and so therefore there are universals" that would be the end of that discussion too.

the point is that if the way things seem to you is a sacrosanct model of the way things actually are — Isaac

You keep saying this, but I've already rebutted it. You might have noticed that if you had actually addressed the content of my last three posts, Since you're not addressing my arguments and you don't have any arguments to offer against the privacy of subjective experience, there's no point in continuing.

This board is a reminder that intersubjectivity often fails.

If we were discussing universals and you said "It seems to me that there are universals and so therefore there are universals" that would be the end of that discussion too. — Isaac

It would be more like if one person was arguing for universals and the other against by citing physics in support of everything being particular. Which would miss the point of the argument for universals, which already acknowledges that the empirical world is particular. The question would still remain, where do the universals we categorize everything by come from?

Same sort of thing with consciousness. You can cite all the neuroscience you want, but we already know the brain is behind consciousness. We still want to know where the red, pain, dreams, etc. come from, since neural activity isn't itself colored, painful, etc.

you don't have any arguments to offer against the privacy of subjective experience — Luke

33 pages and you claim you still haven't seen an argument? Disingenuous.

33 pages and you claim you still haven't seen an argument? Disingenuous. — Banno

Not against the privacy of subjective experience, no. If you think I’m being disingenuous, then feel free to direct me to one.

My argument is somewhere in the first twenty-odd pages. You read it, because you replied to it.

It's as if we were talking about left and right as compared to east, west, north and south. Isaac and I point out that left and right can be put in terms of compass direction; while you insist that left and right are somehow private as if that were an argument against translating them into compass direction.

You talk about the privacy of your sensations - and don't see the irony in that. The problem is not in the argument, but in your capacity to see what is before you.

...as if you were to claim "my left and right belong only to me; you have a left and right, but they are different to mine; I can never know what your left and right are like!"

So you’re not going to direct me to any arguments despite your accusation of disingenuousness? Left and right are not subjective experiences. You and Isaac both think that private experiences can be dismissed with the private language argument. Experiences are not language.

After thirty pages - If you have not seen an argument, why are you still here? Your attitude is disingenuous. It doesn't match your actions.

Try supporting your claims for once. If I’m being disingenuous then prove it by directing me to one argument against private experiences. Of course you won’t, because you only came here to call me disingenuous.

If I said there were thousands of people with Covid-19 in Africa, you'd counter with "Then name one!".

Run along now, Banno.

If there is no argument, why are you arguing?


How are you arguing?

You keep saying this, but I've already rebutted it. You might have noticed that if you had actually addressed the content of my last three posts, Since you're not addressing my arguments and you don't have any arguments to offer against the privacy of subjective experience, there's no point in continuing. — Luke

...this is a purely rhetorical move. If there were no arguments presented here against the privacy of subjective experience, what have you been doing for the last few hundred posts?

Here's a challenge: Can you put Isaac's argument in your own terms? Can you show that you have at least tried to understand it?

What has Isaac been saying, what have you been arguing against?

Can you put Isaac's argument in your own terms? Can you show that you have at least tried to understand it? — Banno

Can you? You call me disingenuous but can’t even direct me to one argument against the privacy of subjective experience, and then you expect me to summarise the discussion for you? Piss off.

What has Isaac been saying, what have you been arguing against? — Banno

I can help a little. Isaac believes things like pain are social constructs, as are things like trees and the moon.

That the category of social construct is also a social construct isn't problematic, because constructs act as models.

So pain is a model of something. The model is real.

Can you? — Luke

That wouldn't help.

Go over it again. You made the claim that Isaac didn't have any arguments to offer against the privacy of subjective experience; that after hundreds of posts on the topic, many by you.

So what do you think Isaac has been saying all this time, that kept you so enthralled?

Isaac believes things like pain are social constructs, as are things like trees and the moon. — frank

Yep; and since social, public and hence not private.

I think Isaac is basically an indirect realist who has a persistent misunderstanding about what others, like Luke, mean by "private."

If we could get past that misunderstanding, Isaac would say, "Oh yeah, of course."

I think Isaac is basically an indirect realist who has a persistent misunderstanding about what others, like Luke, mean by "private." — frank

Maybe. I think Luke has a persistent misunderstanding about what others, like Isaac, mean by "private".

Either way, they're talking past one another.

You can cite all the neuroscience you want, but we already know the brain is behind consciousness. We still want to know where the red, pain, dreams, etc. come from, since neural activity isn't itself colored, painful, etc. — Marchesk

What kind of answer are you looking for then? What would be an answer to the question "Where does pain come from?".

The answer 'pain is a word we use to get others to act in relation to a broadly shared set of physiological states' is apparently 'not an answer'.

The answer 'pain is a public term modelling a fuzzy chain of neural activity mainly from nociceptors through to endocrine response' is also apparently 'not an answer'.

Yet, if you asked me where the motion of a car came from, or what 'temperature' is, these are exactly the forms of answer that would ordinarily be satisfactory.

So what is missing, what form must an answer take in order to constitute one here?

Isaac believes things like pain are social constructs, as are things like trees and the moon. — frank


Yep; and since social, public and hence not private. — Banno

Exactly.

As has been said over and over (even though my own exposition of it is probably excessively computational), the hidden states themselves within any inference system, being hidden, drop out the conversation about it. That doesn't make them unknowable (in the ridiculous Kantian sense) - of course we 'know' them. They directly affect our models with real properties, what more could 'knowing' them constitute than that? But it does make them undefined. The definition, the drawing of lines, boundaries, whatever... collecting up inferences about hidden states into groups and models... that process, to the extent that it is talked about at all, is public, has to be.

No-one just 'knows' what pain is.

When you stub your toe, thousands of neurological events take place, and probably hundreds of mental events. (I don't think mental events are exhaustively described by neural events, but the one certainly causes the other - there's no mental events without neural events - but that's a whole other mess).

Of these thousands, some of them we infer as 'pain'. How do we decide? The answer is that we decide by applying predictive models of what sensations are likely to be caused by, and such models are, without doubt, influenced by the social environment. The mere existence and use of the word 'pain' in association with behavioural cues goes into making up those models by which we interpret the thousands of signals rushing around at the time of stubbing our toe.

No-one is denying that the exact range of signals happening in response to you stubbing your toe is going to be the same as the range that happen when I stub my toe. But the range of response-signals precedes the inference of a 'pain' sensation. Those signals are not 'pain'. Pain is the model, not the signals the model infers from. The signals might be radically different (in their entirety), but the model is not.

Is it different at all? Yes, probably. But this causes us no linguistic problems normally. Am I the same height as you if we're both 5'8"? Yes. If we go down to the millimetre we're probably not the same height, but we don't talk of height in millimetres. Micrometres? Nanometres? At some point we're just different because we're standing in two different places... None of this usually affects our talk of 'sameness', and for good reason.

Notwithstanding the 'how high is the Eiffel Tower' type argument above, even if we were to start talking about the differences between your model of 'pain' and mine, there'd be

a) just as much difference between your model yesterday and your model today as there would between our models today, and

b) your model yesterday (or even thirty seconds ago) would be no more accessible to you than it would to me. It's gone. Replaced by a filtered and re-arranged version moderated by... yep, your social environment.

I'm not really adding much here to Wittgenstein's beetle, only to say that neurologically, we can show some of that beetle and talk about it using specialised technical terms. In doing so, of course, we only create our own new beetles, but that's no bad thing if it gets a job done, which, I think, neuroscience does.

I think Isaac is basically an indirect realist who has a persistent misunderstanding about what others, like Luke, mean by "private." — frank

Spell it out then. What does Luke mean by 'private' that I've thus far misunderstood.

Spell it out then. What does Luke mean by 'private' that I've thus far misunderstood. — Isaac

Me, too. I suspect it isn't consistent.

What does Luke mean by 'private' that I've thus far misunderstood. — Isaac

Something like: there's no such thing as telepathy. You're not Luke, you don't really know what he feels or thinks, you only know what he reports to you, and he could chose to report or not whatever he fancies.

When you say "model", this is basically the same as "representation"

Right?

we only create our own new beetles — Isaac

Create our own new....

What better inkling of “private” could there be? “Create our own new” is merely speechifying synonyms for inventive, individual, personal, and time-successive, all necessary ingredients in the recipe for “private”.
————

your model yesterday (....) Replaced by a filtered and re-arranged version moderated by... yep, your social environment. — Isaac

Nahhh....nothing so dramatic. Nothing but time, replaced because whatever instantiated the model is no longer present, and that from which successive models are created merely represent successive qualities, or degrees, of the original, predicated on successions in time. Otherwise, I couldn’t recognize being in more or less pain today than yesterday if there were no witnesses, which is quite absurd. While it may be the case how I model my pain to my mother is very different than the pain I model for my doctor, there is a certainty belonging to me alone that underpins them both equally, and from that I construct models different from each other.
————-

No-one just 'knows' what pain is. — Isaac

Correct, but irrelevant. Nature saw fit not to require humans to run the gamut of reason, in order to realize injury; survivability is directly proportional to how long one thinks about the danger he’s in. Pain speaks to dangerous effect; reason speaks to the quantity and quality of the cause of it. The one is immediate and not a cognition, the latter is mediate and is always a cognition. Pain can never eliminate its own cause, but reason can eliminate causes such that pain will never be an effect, possible empirical occassions being presupposed.
————-

the hidden states themselves within any inference system, — Isaac

In a discourse concerned solely with humans, which intersubjectivity must be, there is no inference system that is not an a priori human logical construction. How can an inference system have hidden states? What can be inferred from that which is not present as the conditions for it?

Perhaps you’re intending that hidden states refer to the conscious subject who actively infers, but that is a classic categorical error, insofar as the assertion states explicitly “within any inference system”. The inferring subject represents the use of the system intrinsic to his nature as a rational being, but he is not within the system, which grants the states may be hidden from the subject, but not the system the subject employs. If follows that hidden states may be said to drop out in conversations given the necessary predication for its possibility, but inference systems as such, do not speak. They merely present that which is spoken about.

What ta hell is a hidden state anyway? Wait wait, don’t tell me. Hidden states are what machines see but common human thinkers don’t notice, right? So...a common thinking human sees the hidden states a machine shows him, and what.....says to himself...well lookie thaya, I’ll be damned!!! Next time ol’ Perceval next door’s dog dumps on my lawn, those hidden states will show me just how much I hate that farging dog. OH...wait....I’ve already got a pretty good idea about that, so screw a buncha stupid machines. At the same time, probably muttering something unintelligible about their operators.

(Termination of teeth-grinding)

This is to try to put us on the same page: Indirect realism comes in various forms, it has a well known epistemic problem, so if you bring indirect realism, you need to address that problem in some way. Science may assume something like indirect realism, but science can't be used as a support for it.

As Locke's description of it as a dark closet suggests, indirect realism tends to sprout homunculi, which for you means taking all the unknowns of experience and squashing them into a little guy in the closet who does something with a representation or model. He's got a second pair of closet eyes with which he does that, and so forth. You need to explain that away as well.

None of the qualia realists you've been dealing with has tried to present anything so extravagant as theories of consciousness, perception, or metaphysics. They've just been presenting what their own experiences are.

The reason you have to fill these holes is that you've been trying to use theory to wave away direct experience. Do you understand?