We're not forced to, we're just very strongly encouraged to be part of communities. But if someone really wants to self-isolate, they can do so.



That book is about the guy who drove to Maine, abandoned his car and lived in the wilderness for three decades. Granted, he did have to resort to stealing from cottages to survive, but he lived alone without interaction until he was finally arrested.

I haven't read the book, but I've heard about the story on the radio, and the guy (Christopher) claims he was never lonely or bored. His sense of being a self also dissolved during that time. I would guess that means his inner dialog was silenced because he no longer needed to think about himself in relation to others. Except that he did feel guilty about the stealing.

Of course there was the Into the Wild book and movie where another Christopher ends up living in the wilderness of Alaska in an abandoned bus. But he dies from starvation when he eats the wrong plant. The thing with trying to be a hermit is it's hard to survive totally independent of community. People who build cabins in the middle of Alaska tend to have planes fly supplies in from time to time. And some of them do tv shows to help foot the bill.

Everyone agrees that we have experiences of seeing color, hearing sound, feeling pain and what not. But people are going to hotly disagree on the semantics of those terms as they fit into one's preferred solution or defense of the hard problem when it comes to qualia. For some that means dissolving the dispute.

Objections to qualia include its incompatibility with physicalism, the problem it poses for a scientific understanding, and how it makes our conscious world private from others. Those who don't like the subjective/objective split tend to favor dissolving the distinction in favor of everything including mental activity being part of the world. For people who don't like how it's incompatible with the material world, they will point out that it's hard to see how the brain and qualia could interact. Thus the old objections to dualism.

And then there are those who just don't like there being a substantial philosophical problem that doesn't go away, particularly of the metaphysical variety. They tend to view such problems as highly suspect and in need of linquistic therapy.

Personally, I don't see any solution to the hard problem as workable (at least so far). We're conscious, consciousness is at least somewhat subjective, private and non-reducible to brain functioning. That it poses a significant problem is interesting. But I tend to think metaphysical problems are substantial and maybe we're just not smart enough or scientifically advanced enough to solve them yet.

Or alternatively, we're not epistemically situated to answer some questions. Some people hate that, but why should humans be able to answer any conceivable question?

Why not? What's evolution got to do with the judgement of sensations? Evolution requires that appropriate behaviours are produced in response to environmental circumstances. It has no preference at all for how. — Isaac

How do you suppose behaviors are produced in response to environmental circumstances? The brain must be doing something with the manifold of raw sensation. Something like cognition.

That is to have already lumped them. — Isaac

So there aren't unpleasant sensations until we create words for them? That makes no evolutionary sense.

No, sensations are biological, 'Pain' is a concept created by a socially communicating group collecting some of those sensations and naming them. — Isaac

Semantics. What difference does it make if we lump all the sensations which hurt into one general category? The matter at hand is the subjective nature of the sensations.

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

Pain doesn't come from language, it's biological. We wouldn't have language for sensations or feelings if we didn't already have them. That's why there's no words for sonar sensation, or colors outside the three primary color mixes we see. We only create words for sensations/feelings we have as human beings. But homo sapiens don't exhaust the range of possible conscious experiences, given that animal biology can differ in all sorts of ways from our own.

The form an answer needs to take is to show how a scientific explanation of the relevant biology results in conscious experiences. Certain pattens of neurons fire and we experience color. How do neurons firing result in color sensations? There's no answer to this as of yet.

Instead, there's a bunch of philosophical arguments ranging over all the various positions on consciousness. I have no idea what an answer will look like. That's why we endlessly argue over it.

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.

Are the reasons for replying to a question with "no comment" identical to the reasons for keeping mum? — TheMadFool

That would always depend on the particular question and poster. Are you looking for some sort of universal ethic here? There is none.

I'm not a computer scientists, so if there's some technical issue I'm unaware of then maybe this would be difficult, but I can't see the intrinsic barrier. Ctrl+esc gives me a rundown of the cpu's occupation, this, despite the fact that the cpu must be in use running the program which works out how 'in use' the cpu is. — Isaac

Sure, but it's not telling you what the CPU hardware is actually doing. And binary is an abstraction of electricity being moved around through logic gates with high and low voltages.

Inner dialogue is talking, no? — Isaac

Private conversation.

We can use our models and shared language to report the state of our models and shared language. Saying "Ah, but your conclusion is just a model too" isn't sufficient on its own to undermine anything. — Isaac

Our models and shared language include private and subjective. The mental talk is part of ordinary language. What's ironic here is that ordinary language philosophy in the form of a certain interpretation of Wittgenstein is being used to discount the ordinary talk of mental states.

No you don't. You think and wonder using neurons. You talk using language. — Isaac

Inner dialog doesn't exist? I hear my thoughts in words.

Because you're claiming it is something private, yet identifiable. I'm refuting that claim, so the next step is for you to present your alternative. I don't know if you're familiar with how discussion works... — Isaac

You haven't refuted it ...

I'm neutral on no commenting, because people can have different reasons for not commenting.

One might be that they just don't know the topic well enough. Another might be that they don't have the time to make a proper response. Or maybe they just don't feel strongly enough one way or another.

Or, they're Pyrrhonian skeptics and are intentionally not taking a position.

You do realize this is just a social construct right? — frank

A pubic carving up of the world.

I've seen no support for the assertion that you know your own conscious experiences, nor have you even suggested a mechanism by which you could (without public linguistic conventions). — Isaac

Luckily for me, it doesn't matter what you've seen. This is like arguing with a solipsist.

Which of all that (and the several hundred more) is 'happiness'? — Isaac

If you don't already know what it is to feel happy, why should I bother trying to tell you?

When people say "I'm happy", what are they doing with the word? Pointing to a chunk of this stream of experience that has a label on it saying 'happiness'? — Isaac

They're talking about an emotional state.

There's a recent television show called Counterpart where an experiment ends up duplicating our world exactly. The other world is linked to ours through the lab, where the scientist meets his duplicate, and things begin to diverge from there. An organization on both worlds is setup to perform various experiments where one world is the control to gain new knowledge. But things start to take a dark turn as people start messing with their other lives, and the organization turns into a spy agency.

We can still compare someone being happy with someone being sad even if their happiness and sadness are never exactly our happiness and sadness. To the extent we can tell when other people are happy or sad, which is not always.

I grant the comparison is inexact, but there is still a comparison of sorts, in that we discriminate feelings for ourselves and others, and often know what it means for someone else to be sad.

What is your alternative by which we could carve up the sensed world by private means and yet still tell each other what we'd done? — Isaac

Intersubjectivity which includes attribution of mental content to others. I know my own conscious experiences and assume other people have similar ones. Mirror neurons play a role in this, allowing us to simulate what others probably feel.

That's not possible is it? Public concepts require boundary indicators or sets of props which are publicly available, otherwise they're undefined. — Isaac

Only if you adopt a certain philosophical position that makes it impossible.

The last part of the system I described to Luke

... These are then modulated, filtered and suppressed in turn by models in the frontal cortex which is where cultural mediation, semantics, other somatosensory feedback and environmental cues come in to play.
— Isaac — Isaac

So the public referent to "pain in your head" comes from a bunch of technical jargon?

...on the assumption that these refer to something shared - the public concept... — Isaac

The public concept is of a first person experience. That's why it's called a correlation.

No. The neuroscientist is not correlating with experiences he has. He's correlating with the spoken words the subject is reporting, on the assumption that these refer to something shared - the public concept of pain. — Isaac

So why are they called, "the neural correlates of consciousness"?

Here's the thing i would guard against: those who have, either explicitly or implicitly, a theory of the meaning of "red" or "pain" such that these words refer to something in one's mind. — Banno

Where did the meaning of something being in someone's mind come from?

Why do people in ordinary language occasionally say things like, "the pain must be in your head"?

The experience of pain is private" can only be understood by ignoring most of what we know about pain! — Banno

That it hurts?

A blind neurologist will never know that red is. Though he will know the physical condition under which the epiphenomena manifests. — khaled

Reminds me of a short science fiction story in which a cryogenically intelligent alien is recovered from deep space and is restored to life. It's some kind of marine life that has no eyes or ears, making heavy use of chemical detection sensory organs instead. The humans overseeing the restoration remark that it will make communication very difficult, since the creature doesn't experience the world the way humans do. And indeed, the creature, being more technologically advanced, creates a hybrid human from DNA it sampled to act as an intermediary that it could interface with.

which can still be undermined by identifying your 'neural underpinnings', as you put it). — Isaac

That only works we can correlate with experiences we already have.

We can do some of the behaviours of being in pain, or we can do all of them. That we can do only some doesn't have any bearing at all on what doing all of them would constitute — Isaac

Or we can do none of them. The experience of pain isn't a behavior. Behavior is often a result of being in pain, but not always. We can also perform all of the pain behaviors without being in pain, depending on how good of an actor one is.

Therefore, no set of behaviors is the experience of being in pain.

set up this ludicrous notion that if someone faked pain we have no behavioural method of telling, that we'd have to get our fMRI scanners out as our only resort. — Isaac

No, the issue is that pain can be faked successfully, not that we have no way of potentially finding out after the fact.

Because, presumably lacking your own fMRI, how would you ever find out they did, if not by their behaviour. — Isaac

Behavior is often an indicator of private experience as an inference, but it's not always, and it's usually incomplete. The takeaway from this is that behavior is not consciousness, because you can have behavior absent the experience, such as when someone fakes being in pain. Or make a robot that acted as if it had pain sensations, without any circuitry mimicking the neurological underpinning for pain in animals.

I know. What I'm trying to draw out is why you don't. — Isaac

I don't believe you.

How do you know? — Isaac

Really? You don't know?

But you said "science cannot completely show us the conscious experiences of other people". You didn't say 'give us'. The two are different. — Isaac

The first being inferential and the second direct. In those cases where we lack the requisite neurology, we can’t know the correlated experience.

No-one ever fakes pain. — Isaac

If you wish to abuse language to make a philosophical point. Otherwise, people fake being in pain. As in they behave as if they are in pain. Sometimes we can’t tell the difference. This wouldn’t be possible if behavior always revealed conscious sensation.

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

Obviously not, or faking pain for deception or acting would be impossible. I really don't get the behaviorists. It's so clear to me how they're wrong.

Isn't carving up the world a good rough definition of language, in the wider sense of symbolism or reference? — bongo fury

That's a very anthropocentric point of view.

So perhaps you just mean, without specifically verbal language, but qualia are internal symbols? You don't need words to speak the language of colour and smell etc? — bongo fury

I was thinking in terms of the cognitive structures the brain produces internally to make sense of the world. But yeah, animals don't need language to understand smells and colors. I wouldn't consider them symbols, though.

Why not? I don't get that from what I just said. Science can't show us now. But nothing in what I said precludes science from showing us in principle - which is what we're talking about here. — Isaac

Because you stated that one would have to possess the same neural makeup to have all the same experiences.

You have some evidence for this? — Isaac

Cognitive Science, evolutionary biology, various animal studies and object recognition and mapping in computing systems.

Right. Which undermines what you just said. They need not know "what a mate smells like, what food tastes like, and what kind of brightly colored pattern a poisonous animal is likely to have" What they evidently 'know' is what to do in a range of circumstances. — Isaac

In order to do that, they need to be able to cognate, which includes object recognition.

As you admit above, it is far from evident that they do this in any way other than a holistic assessment of the entire set of signals at any given time. — Isaac

I don't see how this helps for navigating the environment. An organism must be able to filter out noise and determine what's important to focus on.

For example, a chimpanzee trained to touch the squares on a computer screen based on the ascending order of numbers 1-9 after they briefly appear. Chimps are better than us at this, btw.



Here's a parrot that can use a few words to pick out colors and shapes:

We understand what it is to ask if your phone is the same as mine. We can bring the phones out and compare them and make a decision one way or the other. — Banno

If one were to be pedantic, as one often is in these sorts of discussions, no two phones are identical, but they might be the same brand and model.

I've no clear idea what you are asking. — Banno

I'm asking if you think we can't exactly compare feelings/sensations.

"Are your feelings exactly the same as mine?" is less like "Do you have the same mobile phone as I do?" and more like "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". — Banno

Is the issue with trying to pin down exactness for feelings as opposed to noting that we know what it's like to feel fear or happiness or pain?

If you tell me you enjoyed a song, I know that's not the same thing as feeling outraged, although admittedly, people do tend to like feeling outraged at times.

At the same time, the question of what immortality (or 'not experiencing death') means is always complicated in esoteric or mystic registers - I get the sense that for these 'mystery' traditions, it's much less 'bodies resurrected on the day of judgment' & more 'you see that life persists despite radical - self/ego-annihilating- transformations.' — csalisbury

I'd be careful to ascribe Buddhist meaning to a 1st or 2nd century Christian text, even if it's non-canonical, "gnostic" one. It would better be understood from its Jewish and Hellenistic roots where salvation is knowledge that frees one from the material world to return to the spiritual source in the heavens. I suppose one could consider that a transformation, but it's more of a freeing the divine spark from its material shell, not so much an ego death.

I don't know that Jews thought of annihilation-transformation of the self, although Judaism, like early Christianity, was quite diverse back then.

In the Gospel of Judas:

Judas said to him, "I know who you are and where you've come from. You've come from the immortal realm of Barbelo, and I'm not worthy to utter the name of the one who's sent you." — https://www.gospels.net/judas

There were these platonic ideas of God emanating beings or spiritual realms with eventually the material world being created by some of the more distantly related and foolish ones. And at least some humans had a divine spark in them. Jesus came to remind them of where they came from. Or something along those lines, although Gospel of Judas was a different text from Thomas.