Ok, please explain to me why we can't talk about all this without using the word 'observer'? — jkop

I was hoping that, by working together on a version that didn't use subjective words, the reason would become clear. But OK, I'll be didactic: Descriptions of consciousness in physicalist terms presuppose the existence, as conscious states, of the phenomena they're meant to explain. (This excludes versions of physicalism that simply deny the existence of consciousness, but that's not your thesis, nor mine.)

Let's look at your original thesis again:

Moreover, conscious states such as visual experiences have a hierarchical structure in the sense that the experience is not solely a biological phenomenon. It is also causally constrained by the behavior of light, and influenced by the observer's psychology, sociology, language and culture. All of these can be described, but none of them is a complete description of the experience. However, the lack of a single complete description is hardly a problem. — jkop

We need a physicalist translation, or reduction, of "experience," for starters. In what sense is visual experience biological? Do we know how our brains create the illusion of the Cartesian theater that characterizes subjective experience? Not at all. You can say, "Someday we will," and I agree that's likely, but at the moment it's unsolved, and it's not a matter of lacking a description, as you put it. We lack any theory at all about how and why it happens.

Even more concerning, the use of "observer" postulates an "I", a subjective point of view. This, for me, is the really hard part of the hard problem. We can't just help ourselves to the term "observer," in trying to explain or describe consciousness. On the evidence, there's nothing in biology, psychology, sociology, language, or culture that even hints at an explanation for a first-person point of view. In fact, you'd expect the opposite -- these living systems are so beautifully and intricately evolved that they seem quite capable of doing their thing like zombies, or robots, with no "there" there. Why isn't that what happened, and what did happen? Again, we can't just say "And along came consciousness . . ." or "Then consciousness emerged as a property . . . " because these are just placemarkers for our inability to solve the hard problem (yet).

Whew. But I really think it's more useful to try it yourself, just as an experiment. Try taking the above quoted passage and rewriting it without any subject-based or experiential terms. I think you'll wind up with something that either doesn't talk about consciousness at all, or else merely defines it as physical, or assumes it to be physical, rather than explaining it.

Ok, J, thanks, I'll respond tomorrow. I have to go.

Ever read The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose? — J
Tried and failed. The maths was beyond me. I’ve often enjoyed Sir Roger’s talks on other topics. I’ve recently written a Medium essay about his views on QM. — Wayfarer

I read Emperor's New Mind long ago, but much of it was over my head. Years later, I'm beginning to vaguely see what he was aiming at : Consciousness is not a material phenomenon, but a non-algorithmic mathematical (logical relationships) aspect of reality. Perhaps it can be traced back to the original LOGOS, the logic of the universe, giving it form and meaning. I doubt that Penrose thought in terms of the Platonic principle of Cosmic Reason as the essence of Consciousness. But he seems to be using immaterial mathematical metaphors which point in that direction. :smile:


"Penrose argues that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus is not capable of being modeled by a conventional Turing machine, which includes a digital computer." ___Wikipedia

"Penrose hypothesizes that quantum mechanics plays an essential role in the understanding of human consciousness. The collapse of the quantum wavefunction is seen as playing an important role in brain function." ___Wikipedia

"The wavefunction is the ontological state of existence of systems in the universe. The wavefunction refers to the probabilistic knowledge that : (a) one physical system attributes to another physical system or (b) a fundamental element of consciousness attributes to a physical system."
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/106658/what-are-the-arguments-for-or-against-the-wavefunction-being-a-subjective-vs-an

"Non-algorithmic mathematics involves metathought, which is the use of intuition, intention, and control. This is what distinguishes humans from machines, as machines are only endowed with an object-language, while metathought is described by a metalanguage." ___Google AI overview

What is logos in philosophy?
logos, in ancient Greek philosophy and early Christian theology, the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/logos

PENROSE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE : to measure is to extract meaning

They're fundamentally different under the assumption that consciousness is non-material, which implies dualism, i.e. that we split the world in two, which is implausible. — jkop

What do you mean by 'split the world in two'? My thought on dualism is that maybe all matter/energy has physical and mental properties. Just as you can't remove the physical properties from matter/energy, you can't remove the mental property. If the mental property is a necessary ingredient of consciousness, then matter/energy is a necessary ingredient of consciousness. And the mental property isn't the only thing needed. What the matter/energy is doing physically is also vital. Not every clump of matter is conscious, despite all of the particles having the mental property.

I doubt that Penrose thought in terms of the Platonic principle of Cosmic Reason as the essence of Consciousness. — Gnomon

Penrose is quite sympathetic to Platonism, although, due to his commitment to objectivism, his notion of reality is rather one-dimensional.

"The wavefunction is the ontological state of existence of systems in the universe. — Gnomon

I take issue with that in this essay.

I suspect that Rouse’s distinction will eventually prove to be untenable. — Joshs

You wish! Just one more knotty philosophical problem that we won't have to deal with. Still, thanks for the acknowledment, appreciate it.

They're fundamentally different under the assumption that consciousness is non-material, which implies dualism, i.e. that we split the world in two, which is implausible. — jkop

Please sir, beg to differ. Dualism posits two substances of different kinds, i.e. mental and material. But consciousness doesn't have to be conceived of as an 'immaterial thing' apart from but different to the physical. Rather it pertains to a different order, namely, the subjective or first-person order, in which it never appears as an object. Rather it is that to which (or whom) all experience occurs, the condition for the appearance of all knowledge. This is basis of phenomenology, which doesn't posit a dualism but nevertheless recognises 'the primacy of consciousness'. The following from Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology on Husserl:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl. Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one—one which, in Kantian terms, focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. — p144

There's a lot more for us to learn about the universe, and so far there is little reason to split it in two. — jkop

Actually there is a very good reason to split the universe in two. It's called time. The past and future are irreconcilably different, and the present conveniently divides these two. Therefore the split into two is already there, as a fundamental aspect of reality.

I know, the right language is hard to find. What I think we want to describe is the subjective event that occurs when, say, I think of a purple cow. The image of the cow is rather like something that "appears to a mind" but if that seems too Cartesian-theater, no matter. We can perhaps find better language, but I hope the target concept is clear enough: First the cow isn't there (for me), and then it is, not as a pattern of neurons but as a cowish purply image. What has happened? That's the event we're concerned about, which I'm suggesting we could call a "phenomenon". — J

But you are already assuming your conclusion by describing some event as subjective. You could have said the same thing without using the word and it wouldn't change the meaning of what you said.

To say that there is something there and then it isn't there can be said about anything in the world. A rotten apple's ripeness was there but now it is not, and an apple's ripeness or rottenness can be described as an event, or process. Everything changes. The mind is not special in this regard. I prefer the term, "process" instead of "phenomenon". I think of everything as process (Whitehead).

When someone uses the word, "subjective" I'm thinking about the form the information takes in the mind as relative to one's person located in space-time. Visually, the world appears located relative to the eyes, but we understand that the world is not located relative to the eyes. It is in assuming that the world is as it appears that is subjective. In changing your perspective in understanding the mind as a map instead of a window to reality do you see your mind as it really is and take on a more objective view of one's own mind. Does your mind exist as it really is? If so, can you say that you have an objective, or direct, view of your mind? It seems to me that we have to have direct access to our minds at the very least, and just as the distinction between subjective and objective is incoherent, so is the distinction between direct and indirect realism.

The problem here is that, in order to get from "brain measurements of wavelengths of light and sound" to "an appearance in the mind" and the idea that "we" interact with the world, we have to import some new concepts. Mind? We? Where did this subjectivity come from? Once again, the hard problem: How do we get from here to there? Why should there be anything like an appearance in the mind, if the brain seems ideally equipped to do the measuring on its own and respond accordingly? — J

The problem is in assuming that you see the world as it is, as if the mind were a window to reality instead of a map to reality. In assuming that the world is at it appears with solid, static objects, (in a similar way that a map uses static symbols to represent a dynamic environment) and trying to reconcile that with the way the mind appears, does one come up against the hard problem of consciousness. Instead, I think of the world as process, or information, and the mind is just another kind of process, or information. To me, the solution to the hard problem lies in abandoning dualistic thinking and adopting a type of monism where the world is not material, or physical. It is a process.

It should be clear by now, that it depends on whether we use those words in their ontological sense or their epistemic sense. — jkop

Which words? It all resolves down to the ontological sense as epistemology is really the ontology of knowledge.

The mind is special in the sense that its existence is observer-dependent, unlike the world. The world doesn't depend on an observer to exist. They have different modes of existing. — jkop

Not according to some interpretations of quantum mechanics (the observer effect). What does it mean to be an observer other than being are more complex process of interacting with one's environment, which everything does, including tables, apples, and volcanoes. So we're simply talking about a difference in degrees of complexity.

I think I could add "the illusion of" in front of every reference to "subjectivity" and it wouldn't alter the problem. If I understand you, you believe that subjectivity only becomes a "problem" when it is labeled as subjective and claimed to be a mirror or a window or something that validly reflects an external reality. But if none of that is so, and what I was calling "subjectivity" is in fact a dualistic illusion, we still need to know how this comes about, and why.

We need a physicalist translation, or reduction, of "experience," for starters. In what sense is visual experience biological? Do we know how our brains create the illusion of the Cartesian theater that characterizes subjective experience? Not at all. You can say, "Someday we will," and I agree that's likely, but at the moment it's unsolved, and it's not a matter of lacking a description, as you put it. We lack any theory at all about how and why it happens. — J

I'm not sure our ignorance is so fundamental. Moreover, the word 'experience', like perceptual verbs such as 'see', are ambiguous. By clarifying their ambiguity we can get rid of some of the problems.

For example, in talk of the experience of seeing a cat, the word 'experience' or 'seeing' can refer to what is constitutive for having the experience: the feeling. But they can also refer to what the experience is about: the cat.

The cat is the object that you see, which causes you to feel a certain way. The way it makes you feel is what the cat is like when it is seen under those conditions, and what the cat is like is not a creation of anyone's brain, nor are the conditions under which the cat is seen.

The feeling, however, is evoked by the brain and your ability to see the cat. But the feeling is not an entity that accompanies the experience, it is the experience in its constitutive sense.

So, what is left to explain is this: How does my brain create the feeling?, and I believe we know at least something about how feelings are evoked by hormone levels, neurons releasing dopamine etc.

The impossible request that we ought to explain how hormone levels etc create the illusion of a Cartesian theatre seems to be based on a fallacy of ambiguity.

This does not eliminate or explain away the feeling, I just don't see a good reason for believing that the experience of what it feels like to see a cat from a first person point of view is impossible to explain. What is there to see is not a mental theatre but reality.

By clarifying their ambiguity we can get rid of some of the problems.

For example, in talk of the experience of seeing a cat, the word 'experience' or 'seeing' can refer to what is constitutive for having the experience: the feeling. But they can also refer to what the experience is about: the cat. — jkop

Good, this is helpful. I'm not using "experience" to refer to what the experience is about (the cat). But nor am I quite using it to refer to a "feeling." I suppose people can differ on this, but when I see a cat, I don't find myself feeling much of anything about it. What I do find is that I have, or seem to have, a mental picture. This is, for me, what is "constitutive of having the experience," as you say. But I don't think it matters too much whether the "inner" part is more like a feeling or more like a picture. The important difference, which you have disambiguated, is between "experience" understood as the object (putatively "out in the world") that is being sensed or thought of, and the subjective event of doing so.

So, what is left to explain is this: How does my brain create the feeling?, and I believe we know at least something about how feelings are evoked by hormone levels, neurons releasing dopamine etc. — jkop

But here, your reliance on "feeling" as the correct subjective description does make a difference. It allows you to talk about hormone levels, dopamine, etc., as possible causes of feelings. I'm sure they are. But the kind of "feeling" involved in having a mental image of a cat is surely not explainable by hormone levels. I know you're not saying that it is, only that we're not as ignorant about the whole process as I've been arguing. I'm not persuaded, though. Can you sketch even the beginning of an explanation of a mental image that involves feeling-type causes such as hormones or other chemical items? I think this would be even harder to do in the case of an imagined image -- one that I simply "think of" as opposed to being stimulated by a perceptual event.

The impossible request that we ought to explain how hormone levels etc create the illusion of a Cartesian theatre seems to be based on a fallacy of ambiguity. — jkop

Can you explain? I thought you disambiguated it nicely. Is this a different ambiguity?

"The wavefunction is the ontological state of existence of systems in the universe. — Gnomon
I take issue with that in this essay. — Wayfarer

The Philosophy StackExchange quote*1 probably should have said that the wavefunction equation represents mathematically the probabilistic ontology of the sub-atomic foundation of the universe. But that's more than a mouthful. And may not make sense without some explication.

I read your essay, The Timeless Wave, and agree with its conclusions*2. For example, where you say "the wave function doesn’t seem to operate within any physical medium", it raises the ancient vexed question of an invisible immaterial Aether within which to propagate. In my own thesis, I argue that the metaphysical Aether is immaterial, just like the hypothetical Quantum Vacuum*3 and the Universal Quantum Field*4. It's not physical or spiritual, but mathematical (statistical) and mental (logical). If Math & Mind are real, so is the statistical sphere of Probability. As such, it's the causal essence (EnFormAction) of the Enformationism*5 worldview; it's where events happen. :smile:

*1. "The wavefunction is the ontological state of existence of systems in the universe. The wavefunction refers to the probabilistic knowledge that : (a) one physical system attributes to another physical system or (b) a fundamental element of consciousness attributes to a physical system."
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/106658/what-are-the-arguments-for-or-against-the-wavefunction-being-a-subjective-vs-an

*2. "And it’s all of this that makes the nature of the wave-function a metaphysical question, rather than a question of physics as such". ___ The Timeless Wave

*3. "Yes, the quantum vacuum can be considered the modern equivalent of the aether:"
___Google AI overview
Note --- empty space is considered to be a potential source of energy.

*4. Quantum Field Theory
A "Universal Quantum Field" in the context of theoretical physics, particularly within Quantum Field Theory (QFT), represents a hypothetical single field that could potentially encompass all fundamental forces and particles in the universe, described mathematically as a complex quantum field with properties that allow for the creation and interaction of all known elementary particles, essentially acting as a unified field where all particles arise as excitations or fluctuations within it; however, such a unified field is currently a theoretical concept with no definitive experimental verification.
___ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

*5. Enformationism :
A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe. It is intended to be the 21st century successor to ancient Materialism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. It's a Theory of Everything that covers, not just Matter & Energy, but also Life & Mind & Love.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Note --- Causal EnFormAction is the essence of Energy, Matter, Aether, and Mind. See thesis for explanation.

Generally :up: but watch out for the tendency to reify, 'make into a thing'. I think that categorises every attempt to conceive of the probability space as something objective. But the alternative is note purely subjective - note the qualification that due to mathematical regularities for example the Born rule, different observations tend to cluster around specific points. Maybe you could say what is transcendent also transcends the subject-object divide. We all share the same possibilities to some extent. Anyway, enough of that, quantum is always a thread de-railer.

But the kind of "feeling" involved in having a mental image of a cat is surely not explainable by hormone levels. — J

Right, but there is no relation between a mental image and hormone levels to explain when the cat that you see is a real cat (not a mental image).

(When you assume that you're seeing a mental image, then you have a relation to explain between the mental and the physical which no-one can make sense of, because of the dualism that it implies.)

What remains to be explained is a relation between the experience (the feeling of what it's like to see the cat) and its probable causes in your brain, the cat, and the conditions under which you see the cat.

A major cause of what it's like to see the cat is, of course, the cat and its visible properties. When you see it, you feel a certain way based on what there is to see. A scary or aggressive cat makes you feel a certain way which is different from seeing a cute or happy cat.

What it feels like when you see the cat is what the cat appears like to you.. :cool:

One might also consider the fact that the the brain adds and modifies its neural networks all the time as you experience things. That's how our brains become personalised. This means that the conditions under which you saw the cat yesterday are somewhat different today, and again different tomorrow. What it's like for you to see the cat changes more or less each time.

How's that for a start on how the brain creates subjective first-person experiences?

Regarding mental images. Beside the ability to see cats, you can remember or know what it's like to see a cat, and you can use the knowledge to evoke the same or similar feelings when you imagine or dream about cats. But without a cat, or with your eyes closed, nothing is seen, only felt as if you were seeing the cat. A "mental image" couldn't even resemble visible objects such as cats or images. But it feels a certain way to imagine a cat, just like it feels a certain way to actually see a cat.

Can you sketch even the beginning of an explanation of a mental image that involves feeling-type causes such as hormones or other chemical items? — J

Just replace the mental image with a real cat. What it's like to see the cat is a feeling, not an image. The feeling has many possible causes, but without dualist assumptions, it's possible to explain.

...processing that information without consciously experiencing it. — Wolfgang

Some of the earlier levels of machine learning are supposed to be examples of what you describe above, but machine data processing is connected to the conscious thinking of the human programmer.

The machine utilizes electric and mechanical power to rotely follow cyclical patterns consciously configured in terms of beginning, middle and end states by the programmer. So, when you connect the programmer to the machine, there is no processing of information without consciously experiencing it.

Information does not exist outside of patterns recognized and strategically plotted by humans. In the absence of the human will, "information" is merely brownian motion.

Dualism posits two substances of different kinds, i.e. mental and material. But consciousness doesn't have to be conceived of as an 'immaterial thing' apart from but different to the physical. Rather it pertains to a different order, namely, the subjective or first-person order, in which it never appears as an object. Rather it is that to which (or whom) all experience occurs, the condition for the appearance of all knowledge. — Wayfarer

Right, so instead of substance-dualism you have two orders or perspectives or property-dualism. All the same, when we want to explain how two phenomena are related to each other, yet assume that they are fundamentally different in a way that makes is hard or impossible to understand how they could be related, then the problem might be in the assumption.

The past and future are irreconcilably different, — Metaphysician Undercover

In research on gravity, there's talk of backwards causation and that time is not a fundamental property of the universe. I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be a hard problem to explain how the past creates the future.

Right, so instead of substance-dualism you have two orders or perspectives or property-dualism. All the same, when we want to explain how two phenomena are related to each other, yet assume that they are fundamentally different in a way that makes is hard or impossible to understand how they could be related, then the problem might be in the assumption. — jkop

No, it’s not property dualism. The passage I quoted was an example of phenomenology. It doesn’t categorise consciousness as a phenomenon, as phenomena appear to consciousness.

In research on gravity, there's talk of backwards causation and that time is not a fundamental property of the universe. — jkop

You can always find ridiculous talk, but it's always irrelevant.

I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be a hard problem to explain how the past creates the future. — jkop

If you ever gave that a serious try, you'd find out that the exact opposite is the case. It's very simple to demonstrate logically that the past does not create the future.

This is because we need to deal with the reality of choice, and the fact that the future is full of possibilities, while the past is fixed, or determined. Those are fundamental self-evident truths, derived directly from experience. And, possibilities cannot be created from a determined past, yet a fixed past can be created from possibilities. Therefore, that the past does not create the future is a very sound conclusion.

Ok, Husserl might not seem to be a dualist, but the assumption that consciousness is immaterial in the sense that it never appears as an object in a world of objects, implies an epistemological dualism, and the hard problem reappears. For if consciousness is immaterial, then it seems we have no way of knowing what it's like to be another observer, or how immaterial experiences arise in a material world.

A similar problem arises for indirect realists because of their assumption that we never see objects directly, only by way of seeing our own sense-data (or mental images) first.

For idealists for whom everything is consciousness, the hard problem does not arise from a metaphysical or epistemological wedge. Likewise, it doesn't arise for direct realists under the assumption that we see objects directly: e.g. what it feels like is what the object appears like.

I think I could add "the illusion of" in front of every reference to "subjectivity" and it wouldn't alter the problem. If I understand you, you believe that subjectivity only becomes a "problem" when it is labeled as subjective and claimed to be a mirror or a window or something that validly reflects an external reality. But if none of that is so, and what I was calling "subjectivity" is in fact a dualistic illusion, we still need to know how this comes about, and why. — J

But that is what I've been saying - that seeing this as a dualist illusion IS the problem. Abandon dualism and introduce the idea of monism and see if that helps you solve the problem.

Subjectivity is the category mistake of asserting that what you experience is part of the object you are experiencing.

For instance,

I'm not sure our ignorance is so fundamental. Moreover, the word 'experience', like perceptual verbs such as 'see', are ambiguous. By clarifying their ambiguity we can get rid of some of the problems.

For example, in talk of the experience of seeing a cat, the word 'experience' or 'seeing' can refer to what is constitutive for having the experience: the feeling. But they can also refer to what the experience is about: the cat.

The cat is the object that you see, which causes you to feel a certain way. The way it makes you feel is what the cat is like when it is seen under those conditions, and what the cat is like is not a creation of anyone's brain, nor are the conditions under which the cat is seen. — jkop

How you feel and the experience is not what the cat is like. It is what you are like when looking at a cat.

Saying things like, "Chocolate ice cream is good and is the best!" is a subjective misuse of language as "good" and "best" are subjective in the sense that they are projected onto the object being talked about when ice cream is not good or the best. "Good" and "best" refer to your feelings and beliefs, not anything about the ice cream. Instead we should clarify by saying, "I feel good when I eat chocolate cream" or "I believe that chocolate ice cream is the best." Here we are talking about our self, not the ice cream.

I think a lot of the confusion is the result of trying to separate our experiences from the object. Which part of our experience is about us and which parts are about the cat or the ice cream? What if the experience of a cat or ice cream is a relationship between ourselves and the object being perceived or talked about, not one or the other? What if our minds are the relationship between our self and our environment?

Ok, Husserl might not seem to be a dualist, but the assumption that consciousness is immaterial in the sense that it never appears as an object in a world of objects, implies an epistemological dualism, and the hard problem reappears. For if consciousness is immaterial, then it seems we have no way of knowing what it's like to be another observer, or how immaterial experiences arise in a material world.

A similar problem arises for indirect realists because of their assumption that we never see objects directly, only by way of seeing our own sense-data (or mental images) first.

For idealists for whom everything is consciousness, the hard problem does not arise from a metaphysical or epistemological wedge. Likewise, it doesn't arise for direct realists under the assumption that we see objects directly: e.g. what it feels like is what the object appears like. — jkop

Other minds do appear as objects in the world. Consciousness is a process. Consciousness models other minds as objects, as in other people's brains and bodies. The brain is not a physical, material object. It is a mental representation of other's minds.

The solution to your "indirect" realism problem is by understanding that effects carry information about their causes. You can get at the nature of other objects via the effect of your mind, just as you can get at the identity of a criminal by the effects they leave at the crime scene, or get at the age of the tree by how it grows throughout the year and the number of tree rings it has.

You can also get at your own state means of your mind. Your mind not only tells you about your environment, but also about the amount of light in your environment, and your own mental and body states. As I mentioned before, your mind is a relationship between you and your environment.

A "mental image" couldn't even resemble visible objects such as cats or images — jkop

For me, a mental image strongly resembles a visible object. So I can only conclude that you're already analyzing "mental image" reductively to refer to whatever physical substrates it may supervene upon. I think that begs the question.

What it's like to see the cat is a feeling, not an image. — jkop

Again, I have to say, Not for me. We all know that "what it's like," despite having become the go-to term for subjective experience, is quite imprecise. Maybe that's a good thing. In my case, the "what it's like" is a combination of an apparent image, often a series of memories associated with the image, probably some future projections about the image, and, sometimes, a feeling about what I'm imaging.

It sounds like where we differ is that you want to eliminate the idea of a mental image altogether. I think there are plausible and persuasive reasons for doing this in the case of perceptions. But not for imagined or remembered images. If these experiences are not, in some ordinary-language way, mental images, then what are they? And how could they be explained away as being identical with their physical substrates?

But if none of that is so, and what I was calling "subjectivity" is in fact a dualistic illusion, we still need to know how this comes about, and why.
— J
But that is what I've been saying - that seeing this as a dualist illusion IS the problem. Abandon dualism and introduce the idea of monism and see if that helps you solve the problem. — Harry Hindu

We agree that subjectivity could be a dualist illusion. (I don't think it is, but I'm happy to assume it for purposes of argument.) But if it is, we still need to know why. You say, rather cavalierly, "Abandon dualism." OK, I imagine a purple cow and I follow this up by saying to myself, "This experience of me-and-purple-cow-image is illusory. There is no separation." But this doesn't make the purple cow go away, or change into something else. I'm sure you don't believe this would happen either, but what do you believe? What changes, for you, in this sort of experience when you introduce the idea of monism? Is it that experience, as presented, becomes a sort of brute fact, about which it's no longer possible to ask questions? This isn't meant to be snarky, I'm genuinely interested.

In my posts above I'm arguing against the property dualism that is implied in the so called hard problem of consciousness. The problem reappears also in epistemological forms of dualism, such as in indirect realism, or in any philosophy in which it is assumed that consciousness is inaccessible to our knowledge.

Those are not my problems. I'm a direct realist, and a monist, so there's no need for you to give me a lecture on the monist nature of the world. Likewise, when I'm talking of subjective and objective in their ontological and epistemological senses, I'm not trying to split the world in two. In a monist world, things can have different modes of existing, and some things are observer-dependent (e.g. money) while other things (e.g. mountains) exist regardless of observers. But thanks anyway :up:

We agree that subjectivity could be a dualist illusion. (I don't think it is, but I'm happy to assume it for purposes of argument.) But if it is, we still need to know why. You say, rather cavalierly, "Abandon dualism." OK, I imagine a purple cow and I follow this up by saying to myself, "This experience of me-and-purple-cow-image is illusory. There is no separation." But this doesn't make the purple cow go away, or change into something else. I'm sure you don't believe this would happen either, but what do you believe? What changes, for you, in this sort of experience when you introduce the idea of monism? Is it that experience, as presented, becomes a sort of brute fact, about which it's no longer possible to ask questions? This isn't meant to be snarky, I'm genuinely interested. — J

How is it illusory? Are you imagining a purple cow or not? The fact that you can imagine things is not illusory. It is illusory when you project that purple cow into the world, as if it were not just an imagining. In asserting that the purple cow is an imagining, and not an organism, you dispel the illusion.

Monism solves the problem because your argument about how material objects like brains give rise to immaterial minds is a problem of dualism. In thinking that the world and mind are two different types of things creates the problem. Thinking of them as the same solves it.

Well, not entirely. You still have to also understand that the way the world appears is just a map and you are confusing the map's static symbols (perceptual objects) with the way the world is (not static objects), which is more like your mind than the way the world is represented by your mind. I do want to clarify that I am not arguing for idealism or panpsychism as that would be another type of subjectivity in projecting one's mind onto the world. Everything is process, relationships, or information. Take your pick. They all mean similar things. The mind is just a type of process, relationship, or information.

In my posts above I'm arguing against the property dualism that is implied in the so called hard problem of consciousness. The problem reappears also in epistemological forms of dualism, such as in indirect realism, or in any philosophy in which it is assumed that consciousness is inaccessible to our knowledge.

Those are not my problems. I'm a direct realist, and a monist, so there's no need for you to give me a lecture on the monist nature of the world. Likewise, when I'm talking of subjective and objective in their ontological and epistemological senses, I'm not trying to split the world in two. In a monist world, things can have different modes of existing, and some things are observer-dependent (e.g. money) while other things (e.g. mountains) exist regardless of observers. But thanks anyway — jkop

Actually, direct realism is part of the hard problem. In asserting that you see the world as it is - as static objects and physical brains, and comparing that to how the mind appears and is described as being non-physical and immaterial is how the hard problem arises because it does not account for causation and that causes are not their effects and vice versa. I have argued that the distinction between direct and indirect is incoherent. What does it even mean to directly or indirectly access something? I asked you what an observer is, and you didn't answer the question.

So it's not just an issue of perception. It's a problem of language-use. We don't need to use terms like, "direct", "indirect", "subjective" and "objective", even in a monist sense.

I find all this somewhat plausible in the case of images that arise from perception of the world, and are meant to "stand for" or "picture" or "represent" something out there. Quite possibly the "out there / in here" duality is either mistaken or badly conceived. But . . . I don't see how it applies to my purple cow, or any other of the myriad ways consciousness operates without any perceptual stimulus. We agree that my imagining the cow is no illusion. How is this still a question of dualism vs. monism? I'm not claiming that the cow represents anything in the (dualistically conceived) world; in fact, the choice of "purple cow" is meant to preclude any such representation.

Yes. The "in here / out there" distinction is a product of dualistic thinking. Do we talk about a table being outside of the apple that is sitting on it in the same way we talk about this distinction between the mind and the world? What if we were to simply talk about the mind as a relationship, or a process, and acknowledge that everything else is a relationship, or a process. Talk about in here vs out there would become meaningless. We can only be ("access") what we are and our experience of things other than ourselves can only come in the form of relationships - of how these other things interact with our senses, in the same way that everything else is a relationship between it and its environment or its own parts, depending on which perspective we are taking.

Imaginings and dreams are amalgams of what we have experienced before. The mind isn't just colors and sounds. There is a logical process underlying it all in the way that it processes sensory information to produce valid responses. We often solve some of the biggest problems by blending together different ideas or experiences we have had prior into unique ideas that can be applied to how we function in the world.

We get most of our information visually so it is no wonder that most of what we imagine, dream and conceive of will take the form of visual models. If they didn't then how would we apply our imaginings and new ideas to what we actually see in the world? I think there are other underlying (unconscious) processes that our dreams "represent" in that dreams are relationships between the way our mind constructs reality using visual information and other unconscious processes.

Computers create models of the world. Does this mean that the computer can imagine things? What makes brains so special in that minds arise from them but cannot arise from a computer? Both are physical objects and both are doing similar things in processing (sensory) information. If a physical object like a brain can produce a mind, then why not a computer? That's the thing - neither a brain nor a computer are physical things. They are processes.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/

↪Gnomon
Generally :up: but watch out for the tendency to reify, 'make into a thing'. — Wayfarer

Thanks. You have warned me about "reification" before*1. But it seems that most Philosophy-versus- Science arguments, going back to Plato's Idealism, hinge on the Reality (plausibility ; utility ; significance) of abstractions. Are Mathematics and Metaphysics "real" or "ideal"? Regardless of how you categorize them, Ideal or Abstract non-things are very important for philosophical discussions, no?.

Is the Aether, postulated by physicists to explain such ideas as "vacuum energy" real or ideal? Here's what I said about that : "I argue that the metaphysical Aether is immaterial, just like the hypothetical Quantum Vacuum and the Universal Quantum Field. It's not physical or spiritual, but mathematical (statistical) and mental (logical). If Math & Mind are real, so is the statistical sphere of Probability & Potential.". Is "immaterial" the same as non-thing & unreal? Is Math a real thing, or an abstraction in a human mind? Is the Quantum Field*2 a perceivable real thing, or an abstract human concept?

I didn't claim that Aether is an actual physical thing, as some physicists seem to imply*2. Instead, I'm saying that it is the Potential for causal Energy ; which is the Potential for actual Matter*3. So, the philosophical question here seems to be : is Potential to Actual*4 the same as Reification". It seems to "make nothing into a thing". :smile:


*1. Reification means to treat something abstract as if it were a physical thing. For example, you might reify an abstract concept like fear, happiness, or evil.
The process of turning human concepts, actions, processes, relations, and properties into tangible things
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*2. According to current scientific understanding, quantum fields are considered to be real, existing throughout space and acting as the fundamental building blocks of the universe, with experimental evidence supporting their existence and effects; although they are a theoretical construct, they provide incredibly accurate predictions about the behavior of particles and are considered the best explanation for our physical reality at the subatomic level.
___Google AI overview
Note --- Is "considered to be real" a fact or a belief? Is a "theoretical construct" a real thing, or a reification?

*3. Yes, "energy is potential for matter" means that energy represents the capacity to do work or cause change in matter, essentially acting as a stored potential that can be released to create movement or transformations within matter; this is often described as potential energy, which is energy stored due to an object's position or state, ready to be converted into kinetic energy (motion) when conditions change.
___Google AI overview

*4. In Aristotle's philosophy, potentiality is the capacity of something to develop into a specific state or perform a specific function, while actuality is the realization of that capacity. These concepts are central to understanding change and reality, and helped Aristotle explain how things can change while maintaining their identity.
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