That's a good point that Data does not eat, so he lacks anything functional related to hunger or digestion. But note that Odo from Deep Space 9 also does not eat, but he's biological. We would also have even more reason for thinking Odo is conscious, but we wouldn't know what it's like to be able to shape-shift, or link together with other Changelings.

Odo clearly has feelings and his people have their own biases and wage war in response to past mistreatment. Now the Borg would be a very interesting compromise between Data and biology.

What Putnam et al are arguing is false. The state of adding 2 would be identical to the electronic state for the electronic device as it adds 2, and it would be identical to the brain state as the brain (as someone mentally) adds 2. — Terrapin Station

I don't think we're doing exactly the same thing as a calculator/computer when we add two, because two has an import conceptual component for us. It's an abstract concept that stands in for any set of two things. That's why we have debates over platonism.

Also, because we learn the rules for arithmetic and memorize basic results, which i doubt very much is performing the same function as a CPU making the calculation. Maybe computing a complicated sum with pen and paper is functionally the same?

However, I think the argument is that functionalism is a kind of dualism, because it's something additional to the physical substrate.

Simulating consciousness is consciousness. Consciousness is a behavioral feature, not a physiological or neurological one. — T Clark

it's not behavior. I can pretend to be in pain or feel sad. i can also hide my pain (within reason) or sadness. When you dream at night, usually your body is paralyzed so you don't move around in response to your dreams. You can sit perfectly still and meditate.

And there are many times we really don't know what someone else is thinking or feeling from their behavior.

Also, we can fake behavior up to a point mechanically and with computers. Siri sometimes tells me, "Brrrr, it's 20 degrees, cold outside." I have no reason to suppose my phone feels cold. It's just programmed to say that for certain temperature ranges.

Data could certainly pass the Turing test if he wanted to. — T Clark

On the show, Data is always puzzled by some feature of common human behavior. Maybe he could convince someone he's autistic, except the can perform calculation and recitation of facts at a superhuman level if asked, and he usually does so unless told not to.

Now his brother Lore could pass. He's a good liar. It helps being evil.

Can you reiterate this for me? What makes neurons special as a carrier of chemical messengers, sodium/potassium gates, and so on? — schopenhauer1

Searle just says we know in the case of humans we know that we're conscious, so it must be tied to our biology, since we don't have any other explanation.

You resurrected a really old thread. But I enjoyed re-reading it after all this time, for the first few pages. But then it fell apart. I take issue with the direct realists in this argument on two issues.

1. They fail to properly deal with TGW's hallucination/dream argument that direct realism has no way of determining whether perception is ever veridical if hallucinations and dreams can be phenomenologically indistinguishable. The counter argument was that the distinction would lose it's meaning if everything was a hallucination or dream.

But consider BIVs, the Matrix, Inception, Boltzman Brains and a version of the Simulation argument (just the brain and inputs). What matters here is that there is never any actual perception, only the experience of perception. The direct realist needs to argue these scenarios are impossible, because otherwise they have no means of saying whether they are directly perceiving the world or are in one of these scenarios. And I don't think we know enough to conclusively discount them.

2. The direct realists attempt to defend the realism of colors, smells, sounds, tastes and feels as objective properties of objects to defend against Michael's argument for indirect realism. And I'm pretty sure problems discovered in ancient philosophy disposed with such naive realism, let alone modern science. And thus TGW's ultimate frustration with where the argument ended.

So ... knowledge is when words are used to put information to work?

And information can be understood as Shannon entropy... — Banno

Well, that brings up the question of whether information exists independent of minds, and minds are just acting on the information already there in the environment, because that's why minds/bodies could successfully evolve.

Alternatively, minds generate the information when interacting with the environment based on what is useful to those minds. If information is a subset of language games, which themselves are made up, then information doesn't exist without language users?

o, if there are other boxes, doesn't there have to be a larger container? — Bitter Crank

Yeah, if the multiverse lies along the 11th dimension, them our universe would have a location in that dimension. Also, if there is an upside down Stranger Things universe, then our universe is located right side up. And if it's the Marvel multiverse, then our our heroes are typically located on Earth-616.

So the answer is that our universe can have a location if it's in some sort of spatial relation to other universes.

No, information does not travel through the air. If it did we’d know every language just by hearing it. First we must have the tools to decipher the language. We know the meaning by learning the meaning. — NOS4A2

Radio and microwaves travel through the air transmitting a boatload of information from satellites, radios and cell towers.

What sort of things can be moved? How about all of the things that have a spatiotemporal location? — creativesoul

Does information have a spatiotemporal location? We often say a file is moved from one computer to another. It might be uploaded, downloaded, synched to the cloud or what not.

We could say any instance of some piece of digital information, such as your banking number, is on a particular machine. But is it on the hard drive, in memory, inside the processor cache? Do the bytes that make up the file reside on one location, or in various ones that change as the operating system or whatever program moves bits around?

Or what if we just think in general about the capital of Australia. Does that information reside on Earth?

It's doing things with words. — Banno

But sometimes doing things with words results in moving information from one head to another.

Why else would the talking heads on Fox News be on 24 hours a day?

Stick a pin in your arm and see if you still think that pain is an illusion. — Banno

The argument I'm opposing in the OP is that since consciousness experiences such as pain don't fit into a scientific understanding of the universe, at least when philosophers start discussing what it's like to be in pain, therefore consciousness must be a sort of illusion caused by some hidden (from introspection) mechanism in the brain which neuroscience will reveal in good time.

But that's just wrong. A misuse of words.

Hm. Odd, again, that folk can't see this. — Banno

By folks, do you mean Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish? They're the ones advancing the view that consciousness is an illusion — a magic show or simulation caused by some hidden mechanism in the brain neuroscience will reveal.

But we don't perceive "appearances" or qualia. They are ghostly objects that arise from invalid philosophical distinctions. — Andrew M

If we perceive the world as colored in, and science explains it without the coloring in, then the appearance of color needs to be explained. It doesn't matter whether we call colors relational, qualia, secondary qualities, representations, mental paint or whatever. Changing the language use isn't going to help.

One might think that neuroscience or biology would be of help here, but the coloring in isn't found in explanations of neuronal activity or biological systems either. This is why we have questions about whether other animals, infants, people in comas, robots and uploaded simulations are or could be conscious (experience a coloring in in their relation to the environment). We can ask what or whether it's like anything to be a bat or a robot using different terms, and the same issue arises.

I have no idea what "strong emergentism" is — Harry Hindu

Strong emergentism means something truly novel that couldn't have been predicted beforehand with perfect knowledge comes into existence when the right physical configuration occurs.

Some people also call it spooky emergentism. I think it falls under the title of non-reductive materialism. I consider it be a kind of dualism, because its emergence can't be predicted by knowing all the physical facts before hand. It's a new addition to the universe. One can easily imagine physically identical universes lacking strong emergence. It's a tacked on feature, basically. Kind of like God saying, let there be consciousness (or universals or whatever) when matter is arranged a certain way.

They will say that we are mere machines that process light waves and reliably spit out true beliefs. — PossibleAaran

Or not so reliably, since this is accompanied with an illusion of color resulting in much ink spilled over the hard problem and also, the problem of perception (given other illusions such as optical, hallucinations, and perceptual relativity).

I'm only familiar with Locke's primary/secondary qualities distinction which is a philosophical distinction. I'm not aware that science makes any use of it, or why it would be useful. — Andrew M

Science is an objective, third person enterprise that abstracts away from individual perception to formulate equations, models and laws. This is fundamentally based on the realization that properties such as extension, shape, mass, composition and number belong to objects, allowing us to systematically investigate the world and form predictable explanations.

The false picture is, for example, that only one's perception of the stop sign is red (or some variant such as sense data or phenomena), and not that the stop sign is red. — Andrew M

It's not a false picture at all because the color red is what we experience given the kind of visual system we have. The scientific explanation is that packets of electromagnetic energy of certain wavelengths are reflected off molecular surfaces into our eyes where cones are excited to send electrical signals to the visual cortex, where neuronal activity performs whatever functions result in an experience of seeing a red colored object. The experience is a correlation and not part of the explanation for molecular bonds, optics or neuroscience.

find that hard to parse. Do you mean we don't perceive the room? But we can feel the hardness of the walls when we touch them, or the coolness of the air. And that can be investigated scientifically. — Andrew M

No, I mean that our perception of room temperature is a creature dependent experience. Notice how one person can feel hot, another cold and third just right in the same room. This sort of perceptual relativity was noticed in ancient philosophy, leading to skepticism of external objects. If the honey tastes sweet for me and bitter for you, who is to say that sweetness belongs to the honey? Instead, I am sweetened or I am whitened was the preferred formulation of the Cyrenaics, similar to how we sometimes say I'm cold. If I kick a rock and feel pain, the rock feels nothing. Pain is my experience of kicking a rock.

The physical explanation is not an experience of heat or cold, but rather the combined energy of all the molecules in motion, which we don't experience directly (or we would have known about atoms and chemistry from the start).

It's also not clear what the "objectively" qualifier is adding if not just to say that such perceptions are beyond the province of scientific investigation. Which is just a reassertion of the hard problem. — Andrew M

It's just a realization that naive realism is untenable, and we experience the world a certain way based on the kinds of bodies we have. Science is our best attempt to get beyond how the world appears to us to explain how it really is (however incomplete it may be).

it's pretty obvious when we discover that solid objects are mostly empty space and the the visible light we see is only a small part of the EM spectrum. It's clear we don't experience the world as it is, thus the distinction between appearance and reality.

agree, and is why computer-brained robots with sensory devices like cameras, microphones, and tactile pressure points where information comes together into a working memory would have "experiences", or a point-of-view. — Harry Hindu

This sounds like the integrated information theory of consciousness. I'm unclear as to where that is a property dualism, strong emergentism or some form of identity theory.

Which is also a false or misleading picture but for different reasons. T — Andrew M

It's not, because some things we perceive are properties of objects and others are properties of our perception. The room doesn't feel like anything objectively, but it does have molecular motion based on the amount of energy in the system.

Science is only possible because we can make these distinctions.

Our practical experience in everyday life is what grounds our language and knowledge about the world (which, of course, includes language and knowledge about ourselves). — Andrew M

So you agree that it doesn't make sense to say that color, sound, etc. are illusions?

A necessary part of dissolving the hard problem is to identify false or misleading pictures of consciousness. One such picture is the Cartesian ghost in the machine. — Andrew M

Right, but the hard problem doesn't require ghosts in the body, only that we take the primary/secondary quality distinction seriously.

To restratre my main point in the OP:

If colors, pains, etc. are an illusion, what makes us think the world we perceive is any better off?

I was thinking about this today and I remembered how TGW would talk about the Cyreneics, and how they went to the opposite extreme regarding perception, and denied that we knew anything about objects or the world. Instead, all we had was what appeared to us in experience.

I think both sides make a mistake in endorsing radical skepticism about our experiences. Different sides of the same coin.

Isn't it, specifically, the third sort of hypothetical construct we consider in the zombie discourses? — Cabbage Farmer

Yes, but I'm skeptical of p-zombie argument because I don't think it makes sense for them to make the same arguments about consciousness. Still, the thought experiment serves a purpose of illustrating what's being debated.

I prefer asking what it's like to be a bat, or whether a computer simulated world could have conscious inhabitants.

To me it makes more sense to say that our color concepts range over physical objects. The word "red" is a name primarily for wavelengths of a certain frequency-range with fuzzy boundaries; and is a name derivatively for physical objects that emit or reflect light of the specified range "in ordinary circumstances". — Cabbage Farmer

This has it backwards. Our color concepts come from experience prior to any scientific understanding of optics, and then they were mapped onto the science as a correlation with our color experiences.

This is where the scientific explaining away of the phenomenal goes wrong. It assumes science is apriori and experience comes after. But it's the other way around. Science comes from experience. The foundation for science is empiricism. Science is concerned with explaining the various phenemona of perception.

And that electromagnetic radiation is what we're calling color out in the world. — Terrapin Station

Only a narrow band of it. The rest of it has no color for us.

Here's an outright denial that credits Dennett and P. Churchland:

How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-conscious.html

That sounds exactly like the argument that consciousness is an illusion, and at least in this case, it's an outright denial of subjective experience.

One more quote from the same article:

But the argument here is that there is no subjective impression; there is only information in a data-processing device. When we look at a red apple, the brain computes information about color. It also computes information about the self and about a (physically incoherent) property of subjective experience. The brain’s cognitive machinery accesses that interlinked information and derives several conclusions: There is a self, a me; there is a red thing nearby; there is such a thing as subjective experience; and I have an experience of that red thing. Cognition is captive to those internal models. Such a brain would inescapably conclude it has subjective experience.

~Michael S. A. Graziano

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-conscious.html

Here is a podcast interview of Dennett from 2018.

https://thepanpsycast.com/panpsycast2/danieldennett2

At around 29:25, Dennett is asked about Galen Strawson's article concerning Dennett's denial of consciousness being the silliest argument ever made. Dennett responds on the podcast that Strawson has mischaracterized the argument. He is not denying that we're conscious, only that people like Strawson are mistaking the nature of consciousness. There are no qualia, instead there is something akin to the idea of "virtual glue" that performs the functional and informational roles that qualia is supposed to be playing.

So, on the one hand, it can seem like Dennett is only disputing what consciousness is, not that we have it. But then he endorses a 100% functional definition that's all just neural activity. This doesn't even amount to an identity theory where our subjective experiences are identical to certain brain states. It's an elimination in the vein of the Churchlands claiming that belief and desire will have no role in future neuroscience, even though we may continue to use those terms in everyday language.

I'm still not clear whether there is a consensus view in this conversation with respect to what counts as a zombie, and what features of consciousness the zombie is said not to possess. So far I have the impression that many of us are speaking at cross-purposes, with different conceptions of p-zombie in mind. — Cabbage Farmer

A p-zombie is missing the experience of color, sound, taste, smell, feels. Thus it has no subjectivity. The zombie is identical in every other way.

There are some interesting consequences for this argument. An identical p-zombie universe would still have all the same stories we have. But many stories have first person points of view. So how do p-zombies understand reading or watching someone's thoughts or dreams? How do they make sense of a character undergoing intense emotion not apparent to other characters?

What motivates p-zombie Chalmers to make arguments for the hard problem, since the hard problem cannot exist by definition in the p-zombie universe?

If so, then it seems it's not consciousness per se that they call an illusion, but only some more subtle aspect that many of us insist belongs to consciousness, something like phenomenal character. Is that right, or am I off the mark in assessing their view? — Cabbage Farmer

That's correct, but it'd kind of a big deal to deny the phenomenal aspect, yes? I understand the argument to be a denial of experiencing pain, pleasure, heat, cold, music, bitter, sweet, joy, anger, indigo, pink, the smell of a rose, the felling of having a body, your private thoughts.

Of course the objective correlation to those experiences remain for the illusionist. I kick a rock and and act as if I have a pain in my foot and my neural activity agrees with my behavior (I'm not faking it), then that's all there is to the pain. With the addition of some mechanism that creates an illusion of feeling the pain.

that it seems as if one is having a phenomenally rich experience of (in his example) green-golden sunlight, Vivaldi violins, and so on. And if there is this seeming, then, once again, there just is phenomenology. — Galen Strawson

Exactly this! Notice that it doesn't require any sort of interpretation as to the nature of the phenomenological, it just is our experience. And whatever mechanism neuroscience reveals behind it doesn't change the fact that it is our experience.

I feel pain, I see color, I hear sound, doesn't matter whether all the properties of qualia are coherent or whether we even talk using those terms. It doesn't matter whether one buys any of the intuition-pumps supporting the hard problem. What matters is that we have these experiences, and those experiences aren't the objective facts. Experiences of color, pain, etc. are something additional.

We have experiences and we have descriptions of the world. The descriptions are derived from experience. That's epistemology. Those experiences include the colors, sounds, smells, tastes, feels and proprioception as we interact with the world. That's how we know anything.

A solipsist walks into a bar and says, "We're all in this together!".

A solipsist walks into a coffee shop and asks, "Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?"

That's all I got. Other than noting it's much easier to take solipsism seriously at 4am in the morning while everyone else is asleep than 4pm.

The experiments are less about illusion and more supposed to show the defenders of qualia are failing to meet that definition. — Forgottenticket

Yes, but Dennett has other arguments where it becomes clear he is arguing that consciousness is an illusion. We don't really experience pain in a subjective sense, because that raises a hard problem. It has to be a trick of the brain.

Nick Bostrom uses this kind of reasoning to argue that there is a Great Filter lying ahead of us, and that we live inside a computer simulation.

The first is why we don't see any evidence for aliens. However, if the reason we don't see any aliens is because technological civilizations are extremely improbable, then there is no Great Filter lying in wait for us. Assuming civilization continues, then eventually we will make super realistic simulations, some of which will be ancestor simulations. The population of simulated people will far outnumber those of non-simulated kind. So therefor, odds greatly favor us living in a simulation.

So either we face extinction soon, or we're simulated. However, I don't really buy these arguments. They seem to be too simple, ignoring potential complications to building ancestor simulations or colonizing the galaxy in a few million years.

What is the brain structure for first person experience? — Harry Hindu

My guess would be those structures that handle sensory data and integrate them into a perception in addition to the ones for memory, imagination, dreams, thoughts and any kind of experience. There's likely a lot of overlap there.

They are all eventually solved by science, — Harry Hindu

You're a time traveller?

In other words, they both one and the same and should be working together, not separately. — Harry Hindu

So philosophy should just be science? But philosophy asks broader questions and questions that science doesn't know how to address. Some questions like how to live are not scientific questions.

nfortunately philosophy doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to solving difficult problems. That is the domain of science — Harry Hindu

If science can solve such questions, sure. Until then, they remain philosophical.

Exactly. That's the why we should be using the term, "qualia" since we don't know that the bat has experiences of color or sound. — Harry Hindu

I try to avoid qualia because it has controversial properties, and will be used by critics to dismiss the argument.

I really don't see how questions like this help us get at the nature of conscious experience. — Harry Hindu

That it's subjective

Doesn't the theory of evolution by natural selection show us that are brain structures evolved from previous brain structures like the kind that that has. — Harry Hindu

Sure, but how long ago did we split off form a common ancestor with bats? If bats aren't exotic enough, what about squid perception when it comes to the feeling in their tentacles? What's it feel like to have 8 tentacles with suckers?

But what the bat experiences something else that isnt color or sound when using sonar? — Harry Hindu

That's the point.

It seems to me that you are being inconsistent in your assumptions. You already assumed that the bat has first person experiences and experiences colors and sounds, but then you want to question whether the bat experience is the world similarly to humans? — Harry Hindu

I don't know whether any of that is true. The point Nagel was making is there is a gap in our understanding, because it would require us to be bats to know. Therefore, subjectivity is something additional to objectivity. Our objective descriptions of the world are leaving something out. Which shouldn't be a surprise, because we have to abstract the subjective out from experience to arrive at objective descriptions.

Now if bat neuroscience determined that bats used the same structures that we do correlating to color experience for sonar, then we could answer the question. But if they don't, we don't have a means of knowing.

Why would similar brain structuring mean it provides a first-person experience but with different qualia? — Harry Hindu

Because we don't brain structures for sonar perception. That's why Nagel chose bats. He could have also gone with whales and dolphins, which would have been even better, since they're smarter and have something akin to a language.

How would it be useful to have a description for sonar experiences? What purpose would the description serve? — Harry Hindu

Useful? Purpose?

This is a philosophical discussion about the nature of conscious experience. It's not about whether being able to know sonar experiences would be useful.

Might one day" being the salient phrase here. — Janus

Yeah, I'm a bit skeptical of mind uploading, but we might get general purpose AI, which then can join this debate. Will be interesting, if that happens. Particularly if they decide to troll us.