Well. let's see: does the world consist of anything "ontologically" that it does not otherwise consist of? — tim wood

That just means is there something fundamental the world is made up of, like water, matter, math, ideas, etc.

If so, is there a way we can know this to be the case? Is there a way we can know anything about the world? Were the ancient skeptics right? What does it mean to know?

But you're right, qualification is always needed, although the terms ontology and epistemology are well established in philosophy, and shouldn't need to be debated.

Wittgenstein had a lifelong obsession with solipsism that appears never to have left him before his death. There's some speculation that his worries over privacy, the nonexistence of subjects, and the linguistic inefficacy of private experiences were a result of his poor theory of mind, since he was likely somewhere on the autism spectrum. Early on he even tried to dissolve reference to psychological subjects in belief reports. — The Great Whatever

I feel like he's not the only philosopher who had a poor theory of mind. What is your view on language, subjectivity and the ability to communicate our private experiences?

And how did the Cyrenaics think we communicated if it was all subjective?

We share the particularity of our different associations and responses to red, but we fail to quite touch the beetle in the box, because the beetle has been defined to be the purified essence of privacy. We have talked of individuality, of subjectivity, in relation to our response to red, but you want to say that this is not the experience of red: the quale always escapes - by definition. But if you strip out every association, every response, is there in fact anything left, some other, unsharable secret? — unenlightened

I think Wittgenstein was wrong about the beetle in the box. We can somewhat share our subjective experiences because we have them in common by virtue of being human. We're not a mix of bats, lions and aliens with different sensory modalities trying to communicate.

My experience of pain isn't a behavior. It's a feeling. It's true that I've learned the language of expressing pain to others in a community of language speakers, but that doesn't remove the fact that my pain is mine and not shared by anyone else. I stub my toe and you don't feel it, although you could empathize and say it looks like that hurt. But then again, maybe I was wearing steel toed boots and just pretending to be in pain.

It's obvious that we each experience things a bit differently. Notice how several people in a room will complain about the temperature being wrong. One person might say it's a bit chilly, and the other that it's warm. I might find it to be just fine. And yet we can communicate our feeling on the temperature and whether it needs to be adjusted, despite each person's experience of the room's temperature being private. It's private in that I don't feel your chilliness or warmness. I only feel what my body feels.

You might argue that I can know you're cold by your behavior. But that's only when you have behavior accompanying your feeling, and your behavior isn't deceptive, or open to interpretation, which it often can be. I might not be able to tell that you're cold, because you're not shivering, and you choose not to complain. Or you might shiver because you felt like someone walked on your grave, and I thought that meant you were cold, when you felt something else entirely. And so on and so forth.

But strip away all the associations and responses that we clearly can talk about because we just did, and there seems to me at least, to be nothing left that is the quale itself. The box turns out not to have much of a beetle after all. — unenlightened

If this were the case, then we'd be able to share color experiences with people blind from birth, and what's it's like to be a bat would have no meaning at all. We wouldn't wonder whether a machine could be conscious, or just programmed to fool us.

It seems that your enquiry has more to do with why we experience colour, rather than how we experience colour. That question could be up there with why anything exists. — Luke

Right, well if we asked why water has the properties it does, we can see why this is so from the chemistry and physics of water. But if we asked why certain biological processes results in experience, it seems utterly mysterious. You're right that we can get at the how. By why anything material would have an accompanying experience is the hard problem. And why just some brain processes and not digestion or rocks or machines. (Or maybe machines can be conscious?)

If it's not too late, what exactly do you understand "Metaphysical Position" to mean? — tim wood

A metaphysical position would be something like what the world ontologically consists of and how we know that.

Hahah, David Brin tells a circular version of that, starting and ending with the physicist.

Maybe it is math all the way down. Still leaves the mental a problem. Not sure how Tegmark accounts for consciousness in his mathematical universe.

What is an example of realist or physicalist / materialist literature in which the reality of biological facts would be rejected? — jkop

There wouldn't be, but those facts would be either reducible to physical facts, or they would be emergent/supervenient on the physical facts. The physical facts are what determine the biological ones.

The question is whether this can work for mental facts.

Here is the part of the colors episode that discusses Homer:

Why isn't the sky blue?

What ontology would do that? I suspect you are talking about some ideology passed for "physicalism". — jkop

Are you not aware of the philosophical literature on physicalism or materialism?

It's weird being in a philosophy forum where poster pretend that terms like realism and physicalism aren't well established terms in philosophy.

I don't make this stuff up. I wish I were that clever!

What exactly do you expect them to learn? Would they be seeing a grey toy truck until they learn to use the word 'red'? :-} I don't think so. — jkop

I'm not so sure about this anymore, after having listened to an episode of Radio Lab in which a scholar of Homer noticed that he almost never used the word blue, and in fact used other colors to describe the appearance of the water, sky, etc. And after examining other works of antiquity, came across the same lack of mention for blue.

The hypothesis was that the ancients did not have blue pigment to color things, and blue is only rarely found in nature, with the exception of the sky or water on a clear day. So maybe they lacked the color discrimination for blue.

As a test, he intentionally omitted teaching his young daughter about blue, and then when she was old enough to speak, started asking her what color the sky was.

At first she looked at him weirdly. He kept asking every time they were outside on a sunny day. Her answer went from confusion to black to white, and then finally she identified it as blue. His conclusion was that we don't see the individual color until our brains learn to discriminate it from other colors. At first his daughter was confused because the sky was a big nothing. Then it was some light color, and finally she realized it was blue like other blues in the environment, since we can produce blues and color things with it.

Being complex and of no interest to fundamental physics isn't a failure to be "real" (Hilary Putnam). — jkop

Which doesn't address the question of whether physics is the correct ontology of the world as physicalism claims.

Talk of physical facts tend to leave out things which are not so relevant in physics, such as biological facts. How is that a problem for "physicalism"? — jkop

It's only a problem if biology isn't necessitated by physics. Physicalism is the modern version of materialism, which is an ontological monism. Matter is all there fundamentally is has been replaced by physics, which means that matter-energy, fields, spacetime is all there is.

It's an updated version of atoms and the void.

She can still acquire it indirectly by other means, via our division of linguistic labour, a use of colour meters and so on. That's how we get to know what things are like in places we haven't experienced ourselves, and a lack of direct experience is no good reason to reject the knowledge. — jkop

Right, but let's say we want to know what bat sonar experiences are. We can only know about bat perception indirectly, since we're not bats and don't utilize sonar. But would any amount of indirect facts tell us what bat sonar experience is? Maybe if sonar experience is similar to vision (as Dawkins has suggested), then we could be noticing similarities in bat neurophysiology, but if not, it would seem we're out of luck.

Mary's in the same position regarding color until she leaves the room. I wanted to modify it to apply to all humans with regards to explaining why we have color experiences at all. If we don't perceive color as an objective property of light or objects, then there is a problem for physicalism, since all the physical facts leave out the color experiences.

Therefore, there are no "physicalists," as you construe them, because no one in their right mind denies having experiences. — SophistiCat

The problem is that some people deny that experiences are subjective, and thus there are only objective facts. That's why Mary's room, the p-zombie argument, the mind/body problem, etc exist and philosophers debate both sides of the argument. Chalmers, Dennett, McGinn, Nagel, etc have written books on this topic.

Dennett has stated that we are p-zombies and qualia do not exist. All of his arguments amount to subjective experience being an illusion.

So the hammer is real, but my pain when I hit my finger is not? — Cavacava

Your pain is real, but pain is dependent on creature with nervous systems existing. It's not a property of the hammer. The question of what's real comes up when we want to know what, if anything, exists independent of human perception, conception, language, cultural conventions, etc.

Everyone agrees that unicorns aren't real. But the idea of unicorns and their cultural representations do exist. But unlike horses, the existence of the unicorn depends on human beings.

Now if one doesn't accept the existence of mind-independent world, then horses could also be said to be ideas in human minds, although we perceive horses and not unicorns as living animals. However, the question can easily be asked why horses can't have minds too.

So anyway, the question of color realism is whether color is like pain or color is like shape, in that shape is taken to be a property of objects themselves, and pain is not. The hammer doesn't feel pain when I hit myself with it, but the shape of the bruise it leaves on my face is related to the shape of the hammer.

To paraphrase the ancient Cyrenaics, I am pained* but I am not hammer shaped. Am I colored or is the hammer?

*I am sweetened was the perceptually relative way the Cyrenaics would put things.

Right! I should have just said that in the OP.

That's a good defense of color realism, but the physical facts about perception still leave out the experience of color. So you're left with #3 or #4. In order for the physical facts of perception to include the color experience, further argument is needed to show how they are identical, supervene, emerge, etc.

So physicalism has a monopoly on the meaning of being a realist? I think Subjectivity has just as much a claim to ontological reality as what is mind independent and but subjective reality cannot be fully reduced to objective/physical reality. — Cavacava

No, physicalism has no monopoly. It's just that realism entails mind-independence, whatever the ontology of that reality is. Subjectivity isn't mind-independent.

Thus, dreams are real, but they're not realist, because they have no existence independent of dreamers.

Physicalism. Stating that some things can't be described, they have to be experienced supports experience being something additional to the physical.

Why? Because the physical is an objective description of the world.

hey might say that certain physical facts cannot be learned by reading a book or listening to someone speak; they must be seen. — Michael

That doesn't help.

Why isn't the position the color is inside and not outside is not a realist position. as in objective vs subjective realism. Are you saying our subjective reality is not real? — Cavacava

Realism means mind-independence. Physicalism is an objective ontology. Yes, it does need to account for subjectivity, and that's a problem.

I basically agree, though I would note that we mean roughly the same thing when we say that dropping a rock on our foot hurts or that the rose is red, or else ordinary communication would not be possible. — Andrew M

When a rock is dropped on my foot and I say that it hurts, I certainly don't mean the resulting behavior, I mean the felt pain. Similarly, when I comment on the redness of a rose, I don't mean the wavelength of light.

What I'm communicating is the experience, not the behavior or optics. The reason we can communicate experience is because we're human and thus have similar experiences. But you notice how it doesn't always work. Sometimes what one person experiences is not entirely communicable to another. Sometimes we struggle to put into words what we feel.

Sometimes I just don't understand what you're talking about. I can't relate. There is a sense in which we're all our own island, separated from the other by this gulf of lack of understanding that cannot fully be breached by language. What is to be me is not what it is to be you, and you can't know that fully because you don't experience being me, and vice versa. There is definitely a private, unshareable aspect to our being.

Similarly, a behaviorist or physicalist can deny the existence of qualia, while affirming that dropping a rock on your toe hurts and that roses are red. — Andrew M

Going back to this:

Hurting means to feel pain. It's an experience. It can be accompanied with behavior, but not always. It's also not a neurological explanation, because people felt pain before they knew anything about neuroscience.

The rose being red is problematic for the physicalist because the experience of red color isn't part of the physical description of the world. The physicalist is put into a difficult position of defending color realism.

The behaviorist is put into a extremely counter intuitive position of reducing feels to behavior, despite the fact that people do feel plenty of things without behaving in a detectable manner. That's why we can't always tell what people are thinking or feeling. Behaviorism has no answer for that other than to fall back on neuroscience.

In any case, my argument would be that some of our concepts are subjective and not behavioral or physicalist. When I say that it hurts or the rose is red, I mean my experience of feeling pain and seeing red, not howling and jumping around, or a scientific account of optics and reflective surfaces.

I think that alone makes it clear why the behaviorist and physicalist cannot simply redefine consciousness to avoid the hard problem. Instead, they have to argue for reducing experience to behavior or physical explanations.

I don't think behaviorism can possibly succeed, and it's fallen out of favor, with functional cognitive explanations and neuroscience taking it's place. Turns out the black box really does matter.

The jury is still out on physicalism, with some physicalists arguing for nonreductive and emergent accounts of consciousness.

In other words, a behaviorist or physicalist can affirm that consciousness is real, but deny the dualist explanation of consciousness. — Andrew M

But what does a behaviorist mean when when they say that dropping a rock on your toe "hurts"? If they mean you hop up and down and yell, then that's not consciousness. That's simply behavior. It they mean certain nerves are firing resulting in that behavior, it is again not consciousness, it's neurological activity.

In both cases, the behaviorist and physicalist are using the word consciousness to mean something entirely different.

that they're both referring to the same thing but that one of their accounts of what that thing is is mistaken? — Michael

It's easier to see this is not the case if we avoid the word consciousness and stick with qualia and behavior.

It's clear that when speaking of qualia we are not talking about behavior, and vice versa. A behaviorist would deny the existence of qualia, not say that qualia is actually behavior, because that makes no sense.

Surely you accept that when Bob talks about stars being holes in the sky and Mary talks about stars being balls of plasma you accept that they're both referring to the same things — Michael

They're referring to the same phenomenon in the night sky, yes.

Then why is it so hard to accept that when one philosopher talks about consciousness being physical and another philosopher talks about consciousness being non-physical that they're both referring to the same thing — Michael

This started with behaviorism. The physicalist is more challenging, because they might say that there is a physical explanation for consciousness, not that consciousness is brain activity. But we'll stick with equating consciousness to behavior or brain states.

In that case, there isn't a common referent like there is with those lights in the night sky. This is because the behaviorist and physicalist are not talking about the same thing at all. They are referring to behavior when someone is in a wakeful state, or the activity of a brain in a wakeful state.

But consciousness in the qualia or subjective sense is not behavior or brain states. The closest you can get to making this claim work is identity theory of mind where brain states and mental states are said to pick out the same thing somehow, despite differing conceptually.

So your answer is just that they're referring to the same thing? — Michael

If by same "thing", you mean using the same word, then sure. But words can have multiple meanings, and consciousness is one of those words.

I love icecream. I love how the boss schedules these stupid meetings. I love my family. I'm in love with that girl. I love that dancer!

If Bob argues that stars are holes in the sky and Mary argues that stars are balls of plasma, how can they be referring to the same thing? — Michael

They're referring to pinpoints of light in the night sky, but I don't see how the analogy applies to consciousness, other than the use of that word.

No they're not (always). They're saying that the real thing that we refer to by the term "consciousness" is just behaviour/brain states and not some non-physical thing. Just as the real thing that we refer to by the term "star" is a ball of plasma and not some hole in the sky. — Michael

So when we talk about inner, private, subjective states, we're really just talking about behavior or brain states, according to behaviorists or physicalists. Where behavior or brain states are objective.

That's exactly like saying that when we talk about belief/desire, we're really talking about brain states. But they're not the same concepts.

So then the question is what's the referent both sides are talking about? When Dennett argues that consciousness is functional states, and Chalmers argues that consciousness is qualia not reducible to physical, behavioral or functional states, how can they be referring to the same thing?

I understand the star analogy, but what would be the star in this case, since one side means qualia, and the other means behavior or brain activity? I'm not seeing a common referent. Rather, I see the same word "consciousness" being used differently.

We seem at cross purposes. I wasn't talking about the ability to imagine the sounds, sights or feelings of language as such. But sure, braille is another possibility. You could have a feeling of bumps under your fingertips as the equivalent of an inner voice. — apokrisis

I read an interesting short science fiction story set in the future where humans travelling in deep space come across a five million year old escape pod of an alien race thought to be extinct. The pod held an alien in cryostasis. The humans revived it. It was a crab like creature that had no eyes or ears. It primarily detected the world through smell or taste, but it's race was much more advanced.

It ended up using pieces of the pod to synthesize materials and plants, then sampled one of the humans for DNA to grow a human hybrid child that had a vastly larger number of neurons throughout it's body (similar to the alien crab). The child then learned human language, history, technological capabilities and politics from the ship's AI at high speed in a short period of time. After that, it interface with the alien and then communicated its desires back to the humans through the hybrid child.

The humans realized at first they were going to have troubles communicating with the alien because it had no sight or vision, and was crab-like, but luckily the alien was smarter than them.

That's not how it works. If you were to go back to some relevant period in history and tell the people there that stars were luminous spheres of plasma held together by their own gravity, would it be right for them to reject your claim on the grounds that that's not what they mean by "star" and that you're just redefining the word? Of course not. The word "star" refers to some real thing in the world that we just might believe to be something other than what it is (e.g. a hole in the sky, or whatever it was they believed). And in this case, the word "consciousness" refers to some real thing in the world that we just might believe to be something other than what it is. — Michael

I know where you got that from. It's from the eliminative materialism, where beliefs and desires are eliminated from an explanation of in favor or neurological explanations for behavior. But if the discussion is over intentionality in philosophy of mind, then eliminating intentional states means you are redefining what mind is.

In this case, the behaviourist or physicalist is saying that the real thing that we refer to by the word "consciousness" is behaviour or brain states, and that if we believe it to be something else then we're mistaken. You can argue that consciousness isn't these things, but you can't argue that their position relies on a redefinition of "consciousness". — Michael

It is a redefinition of consciousnes because consciousness means subjectivity, and those two things are objective.

So what the behaviorist and physicalist are arguing is that consciousness doesn't exist. But they want to keep using the word, and here the problem is that English allows more than one meaning for conscious, which would be awake versus asleep for the behaviorist.

Notice how Dennnett wants to quine qualia, but still wants to use consciousness to mean functional states. If you quine the subjective away, then human beings are p-zombies, and Dennett has said as much.

A p-zombie by definition is lacking consciousness in the subjective meaning of the word, which is what the behaviorist/physicalist is arguing when they say that consciousness is behavior or brain activity, full stop.

So there was a neural basis established for both language and those conceptual modalities. — apokrisis

But why should language require visual or auditory signs? Humans utilize those two senses heavily, but that doesn't mean they're necessary for language.

But the proper response wouldn't be to confirm or deny the possibility of visualizing an abstract triangle, but to say that dealing with abstract triangles involves a capacity different than 'visualization'. — csalisbury

More to the point, why suppose that the existence or ability of something depends on it's ability to be visualized? I can't visualize a tree falling in the woods with nobody around, but I can conceive of it. I'm sure Hellen Keller was able to conceive of things without utilizing visual or auditory signs.

They're not redefining consciousness, but claiming that what we refer to by consciousness is just behaviour. — Michael

That's redefining consciousness to be behavior. It's not at all what most people mean by consciousness. Nor is it traditionally what is meant in philosophy.

It's similar to the physicalist who might say that what we refer to by consciousness is just electrical activity in the brain. — Michael

This is again redefining consciousness to mean brain activity. It is not the same meaning, not remotely.

It's an easy way to try and win a debate, though. Just change the meaning of the term under question and claim there's no hard problem. But it's bad philosophy.

I recall hearing part of this NPR show about a woman who went to live with a tribe that used directional greetings. They were always saying what direction they had come from or went to. She tried really hard to become competent at always knowing what direction she was headed. The result was that she began to develop a visual bird's eye sense of direction where she could just visualize where she was at from a viewpoint looking down on things.

I didn't know that was an ability you could develop. That blew my mind.

Behaviorists are committed to the idea that exhibiting a particular behavior is a sufficient condition for being conscious, so for them a true p-zombie is an oxymoron. — SophistiCat

Isn't that the same thing as redefining consciousness? Or are behaviorists merely claiming that certain behaviors are indication of consciousness? That you can't have a conscious organism without some resulting behavior, thus p-zombies are impossible? That it would make no sense for a p-zombie philosopher to be discussing qualia.

One should note that not all behavior is conscious, that machines can be made to mock some conscious behavior, that we don't agree on what sort of behavior would qualify a non-human animal for being conscious, and we can't tell whether a comatose patient is sometimes conscious. We also can't consistently guess what someone is thinking.

I can certainly understand where Dennett is coming from in saying that this imagining is verbal in nature, that really just involves considering and understanding certain words and phrases. — Michael

Did you read my Temple Grandin quote where she said that she does not think verbally at all, but only in pictures? She has the opposite condition of aphantasia.

As for your difficult to visualize examples, someone like Grandin might not be able to visualize it, and would therefore have a hard time understanding what is meant, based on some of the other things she has written.

Why wouldn't people differ in their abilities to visualize and verbalize internally?

You know, Einstein had a huge visual cortex apparently. — Wosret

First time in my life I had a bad thought involving Einstein.

The thing about women being 'earthy' and men having their 'heads in the clouds' – women as unified bodies and men as souls attached to bodies – is an old stereotype. The general consensus among modern Westerners is that it's highly sexist and demeaning of women (as is I take it the notion of 'feminine wisdom,' which is supposed to be more earthy, less abstract wisdom). But who knows? Maybe men tend naturally to dualism and abstraction away from their embodied circumstances. — The Great Whatever

The modern trend is to downplay biological differences between men and women in the interest of equality. But that doesn't mean those differences can't be significant in some ways, generally speaking. Maybe one day when the equality issue is fixed, we can be more objective about our biological differences, individually and gender wise.

I recall reading one feminist who would become outraged at any suggestion of biological differences, claiming that culture makes any such differences irrelevant. That sounded quite dogmatic to me, but I understand the motivation for it.