But brains are not consciousness, brains are conscious [of stuff] - see the difference? It's not what the brains are made out of, it's what they do. — SophistiCat

Sure, so it's not what a car is made of, it's what it does.

Physical processes are part of the ontological commitment to everything being physical. Brains not in action aren't experiencing anything.

So does this help explain experience, saying that brains in action are conscious of something, but hurricanes, meteor showers or smart cars in action are not?

I mean, consciousness is a wondrous thing and it certainly has plenty to be puzzled about, but let me remind you again that physicalism isn't supposed to be an oracle that will answer all of your questions. — SophistiCat

No, but it's an ontological commitment to physical systems. So if anything can't be explained in terms of some physical system, process, or parts, then the ontology is in question.

It's possible for physicalism to be false. Maybe it's ontological commitments are incomplete. Experience isn't the only challenge.

Why is experience problematic to physicalism? — SophistiCat

Because nobody so far has come up with a way to show how experience is constituted by physical parts or processes. Neuroscience falls into that category, since it's positing neurons, neurotransmitters, etc, all of which are made up of physical parts.

To put it another way, the concepts of experience don't fit into the concepts employed by biology, neuroscience, chemistry, physics. It's really an issue of whether an objective account of the world can explain subjectivity. So it applies to computationalism as well.

Max Tegmark's mathematical world has the exact same problem. If the only real properties are mathematical ones, then how can some mathematical systems have experience, since experience isn't a mathematical property or concept?

If experience is actually mathematical, then someone needs to demonstrate how that's so.

Anyway, what question are you actually asking above? — SophistiCat

How experience is made up of physical stuff. Saying that meat experiences color, while cars don't because meat, isn't an answer.

What sort of answer would you accept? — SophistiCat

An answer that would make the puzzlement go away, where we could see that experience is physical stuff, probably because we were tricked by a cognitive illusion about what experience is, or something.

Physicalism posits answers to certain specific questions, and that's it. — SophistiCat

Physicalism is an updated version of materialism, not the science of physics. It just says that everything is made up of whatever physics posits. Cars being made up of physical parts isn't an issue for materialists. But experience is problematic.

I didn't make this stuff up.

Which metaphysical view explains subjectivity? Actually, which other metaphysical view offers an explanation for anything? — tom

There's always idealism, where it's mind that matters, and not the other way around. Then there's dualism, panpsychism, and neutral monism.

They have their strengths and weaknesses. Idealism doesn't have a mind/body problem, but it sure seems like we experience a material world.

Where is the problem? Some systems are cars and others are not. Is that a problem too? — SophistiCat

Physicalism can't explain why some physical systems have experience and others don't. You might ask so what, but physicalism is supposed to present a comprehensive ontology. It can't leave anything out and be true.

It's just a poorly constructed capitalist assembly line of bad to mediocre to good resume competitions between people that usually don't even know what they want to do in life. — Heister Eggcart

The robots are coming, so maybe the role of education will change.

It isn't always the teachers' faults, though. Lots of factors go into why most kids arrive at the high school level dumb as rocks. — Heister Eggcart

I'm not blaming the teachers, I'm questioning whether the way the system is set up makes sense, if the goal really is education.

n no case do testing or grades prove very much. Except that high test scores and good grades give you the pass codes that allow you to advance ahead several steps. — Bitter Crank

I'll confess to being caught up in working hard for grades at some point. It worked, but when all was said and done, I realized that really learning the material in way that would have stayed with me would have been far more value, even if I got Cs instead of As doing so.

In high school, the class that garnered the most enthusiasm was driver's education. That one had obvious real life benefit. I can't tell you how many times someone has asked what benefit geometry or algebra was. It's interesting that the answer given is that it teaches you to think, yet there was no critical thinking or statistics class, not at my high school. A stats class seems to have a lot more obvious real world benefits that could be explained to students.

In college among the liberal arts electives, it was the world literature class, because we discussed and debated the meaning of famous writings. I've noticed that with foreign language, students tended to be more enthusiastic if they were planning on visiting a country that spoke that language.

This is why I mentioned that schools are increasingly forced into being a parental apparatus because modern children are little shits, by and large. — Heister Eggcart

But maybe the approach to education is just wrong. Why do you need to pass tests and get grades? Why do we all need to be taught the same things? Is that more important than learning something interesting that will possibly be of value to you the rest of your adult life? It could be a trade skill, could be critical thinking, maybe history or philosophy if a student has interest in that, perhaps actual fluency in another language, maybe organization and planning skills.

Just feels like a lot of it was a waste of time after elementary school and before I settled on a major in college.

At the high school level, at least, requiring most topics isn't bad, otherwise most students would not take anything. — Heister Eggcart

If they won't take anything, because they rather be playing video games, doing drugs, or possibly earning money, then shouldn't that tell you something?

Speaking of you United States, I don't think you realize the degree to which the state has its hands in teacher performance and how they have to teach. — Heister Eggcart

Yeah, I'm not sure that's really helping.

owever, lecturing and assigning homework is rarely bad teaching. — Heister Eggcart

Not in itself. I have enjoyed my share of lectures, and learned from quite a few homework assignments. It's not that. It's the whole being forced into a pseudo-liberal arts education where it's good that everyone be required to take a year of foreign language, geometry, civics, etc. But then you master none of it, forget most of it, and mainly do enough to get whatever grade you feel you need to have.

No real desire there to actually learn, in general.

As if one might test, assign homework and lecture to a group who did not first know how to behave. — Banno

Sure, but at what age do you suppose that's learned?

Providing guidance as to how one ought behave socially is pivotal to teaching; One might pretend that teachers are not moral instructors, but it would be no more than pretence. — Banno

If that's the case, seems like teachers wasted a lot of time lecturing, assigning homework, and testing on stuff most of us largely forgot that wasn't social. I guess we learned to mostly get along being forced to learn in a place with a lot of people we didn't particularly care bout for seven hours a day. Preparation for the office, I suppose.

The brain doesn't generate color, it experiences color (or rather, your entire organism experiences color, since the brain does not function in isolation from the rest of the organism). It would be senseless to examine the brain looking for the experience of color - what would you expect to find? When you want to drive somewhere, do you just sit and stare at your car, expecting the driving to happen by and by? — SophistiCat

And so some physical systems have experiences, like my brain/body, and others don't, like my car (which could be smart and drive itself these days) or the rock I kicked.

That's why it remains problematic for physicalism.

Is a meteor shower computationally universal? — tom

Lanier's argument was that any physical system is, if you squint at it just right. Meaning, we interpret (and build) our computing devices to be manipulating symbols because that's useful to us. But a computer doesn't really operate on 1s and 0s (or high/low or on/off). That's just an interpretation. The real functionality is driven by physics, not computer science or boolean algebra. As such, aliens might think our computers were heaters (they produce heat).

If we wanted to, we could interpret other physical systems to be doing computations. But you have to read the paper to see how he goes about setting up the meteor shower computer thought experiment, and see whether you agree with him.

His fundamental point is that computation is cultural (physical systems don't actually manipulate symbols), not ontological, but that consciousness is ontological, and the role it plays is to select how we experience reality, out of the many ways it could be experienced (given what we know about physics). As such, conscious beings determine what computation is, not the other way around.

What's worked in the past is likely to work in the future. — Mongrel

Or maybe over time humans figure out better ways of making things work. Conservatives seem to want to start with Ancient Greece or the 1950s, but human existence stretches back thousands of years before then.

The truth is that most of human history is that of being in small groups of hunter/gatherers. Farming and civilization is relatively recent. And over the time period of civilization, populations grew, technology advanced, and civilizations became more complex. Our understanding of the world, including the nature of social interaction and civilizations has changed over time as well.

You really wouldn't want Plato to come back to life and tell a modern country how to organize it's government. Nor would you want Jefferson prescribing an economic model. A lot has changed since then, and lot has been learned that they didn't know about.

As such, the conservative approach seems at odds with reality. Things change. A war to end all wars in 1918 didn't seem like that bad of an idea at the time, but such a war now is apocalyptic.

We could, of course, record any of these facts in a computer. The impossibility arises when we consider how to record and make accessible the entire, unsurveyable, and ill-defined body of common sense. We know all these things, not because our “random access memory” contains separate, atomic propositions bearing witness to every commonsensical fact (their number would be infinite), and not because we have ever stopped to deduce the truth from a few more general propositions (an adequate collection of such propositions isn’t possible even in principle). Our knowledge does not present itself in discrete, logically well-behaved chunks, nor is it contained within a neat deductive system. — Wayfarer

Exactly! But there has been an attempt to do that. The project is called Cyc. It's an attempt to codify human common sense, providing a program with the knowledge needed to reason like a human being. The philosophy behind the project is summarized as, "Intelligence is 3 million rules". So, a bunch of propositions linked together in appropriate ways, permitting the right sort of inferences.

I first read about this in the 90s, and it was immediately apparent to me that this is not what human intelligence is. But, Marvin Minsky, a founder of Artificial Intelligence, has stated recently that it has been the only real attempt in AI research to create common sense in a machine, which Minsky sees as fundamental to creating human level, or general purpose AI.

The fact that the computer has a drastically more complex design does not make it anything more than a tool. — Cavacava

I agree, and that was Jaron Lanier's point to the functionalists who think that the mind can be computed, which is why he came up with a bizarre scenario of using a meteor shower instead of a billion Chinese to implement a digital simulation of a person. For functionalists, the substrate is immaterial, as long as it provides the functionality.

How is the algorithm realised? i.e. turned into physical form? It requires an intepreter - otherwise it is just marks on paper — Wayfarer

What is an algorithm computed by a processor? It's just shuffling around 1s and 0s, right? Or to be more precise, it's just moving electricity around.

If we wanted, we could have a billion robot arms righting the writing to paper. Naturally, these would be of Chinese manufacture.

Is there an objective account of life? Can a "pencil and paper" be alive? — tom

Is a sufficiently sophisticated simulation of a living organism alive? At that point it might be a matter of how we wish to use words, although it could have ethical and legal ramifications at some point, if it's simulated human life.

If you watch or read any science fiction, you're probably come across advanced virtual worlds where characters in those worlds experience their digital reality like we do the physical world. In the book, "Permutation City", set in the 2050s when brain scans are detailed enough, digital human copies live in virtual worlds.

We can ask a Chalmers type question about all such scenarios. Are our digital copies p-zombies, or does it make sense to suppose they see color, hear sounds, etc? I don't think saying it's just a matter of how we wish to use words helps here.

Consider that you were given the option of uploading your mind to a virtual world where you don't have the same physical limitations, such as growing old. But the process is destructive to your physical self. Do you do it in anticipation of experiencing the joys of digital life? Or do you suspect that your digital self is just a bunch of 1s and 0s that won't experience anything at all?

If you think that your digital self can have experiences, then why not a pencil and paper version? What difference does the substrate matter? By the 2050s, it could be a quantum computer server farm instead of silicon and electricity.

Do physicalists think consciousness is "explainable" in physical terms? Life isn't even explained in physical terms, but rather in terms of abstractions that supervene on the physical. — tom

They think consciousness is explainable in term of abstractions that supervene on the physical, such as neuroscience. So if neuroscience can fully explain color experience (at some point in the future), then it's physical.

More broadly, it's about whether an objective account can be given for subjectivity. Tying this back to the OP, if there is such an objective account, then it might be computable, and if so, then there should be some algorithm for computing an experience of seeing blue. And if that's the case, then why wouldn't a pencil and paper computation of the algorithm result in that experience?

That is, unless one intends to posit some positive metaphysics specific to consciousness - you know, the soul or some such. — SophistiCat

I'm under the impression that modern philosophers don't appeal to the soul when defending versions of consciousness which aren't explainable in physical terms. Rather, they come to the conclusion that physicalism is false.

Of course, what constitutes "true" understanding, as well as "true" conscious experience, is anyone's guess. I don't think there is a metaphysical truth of the matter here, because we are ultimately just stipulating how we are going to use words such as "understanding" and "conscious experience". — SophistiCat

We don't have to use those words. The sky looks blue to me on a clear, sunny day. But if I could see the rest of the EM spectrum in some range of color, it would look quite different. But what color is the sky when nobody's looking?

That might sound like a silly question, but consider that asking about other properties of light or the atmosphere when nobody is looking is answerable by physics. So then, where does the experience of color come from, if it's not in the sky or photons of visible light?

A tempting answer is to say that the visual cortex of the brain generates color. But when the brain is examined, there is no color to be found there, of course. So where is that color experience taking place?

Maybe it's in the interaction between the visual system and the environment. But that's just moving the problem from the brain to the entire visual system. There is still no color to be found. It's only there when someone is experiencing it.

So we end up with an objective/subjective divide. The objective account of vision leaves out the color experience.

That's why when we want to know what a bat experiences, if anything, when using echolocation, we have no way of answering that question, since we lack bat experiences, unless we can correlate bat neurophysiology for echolocation with our physiology for some experience we have.

It's the same problem a person born blind from birth will have in trying to imagine what a rainbow experience is like. No amount of third person explanation can relay color experiences.

-lots of folks have had gastrointestinal problems where they've ended up with parts of their gastrointestinal system damaged or removed and there's no evidence that that's affected anything mental in those individuals. — Terrapin Station

Anecdotally, I heard otherwise on an episode of RadioLab, where a guy had to be fed from a device because of a hole in his intestines which the doctors couldn't surgically repair. He developed the most intense cravings for food that nearly drove him crazy. At one point, he ended up in some stranger's backyard, taking over their grill, just because of the smell of the food.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/197243-gutless/

Also, there's evidence that the bacteria in your gut influence your mood.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/can-the-bacteria-in-your-gut-explain-your-mood.html?_r=0

I'd also go further and add that not only does the object look a particular colour in a particular light, but that that object IS that particular colour in that particular light (from a particular perspective, of course). The object's properties are being directly affected by the properties of the light source, which is affecting the properties of our perception of the object. So the object is "blue" in one kind of light, and "green" in another kind of light, and so on. — numberjohnny5

I don't think this works, because the physics will not agree with that (it's the same wavelength in all cases, and nothing has changed on the object's surface), and you have optical illusions where we see color that isn't there at all.

It's clear that we're seeing the object as different colors in different lighting conditions, because that's how our color vision works, not because the object has different colorings.

If anyone wants to reject the above on idealistic grounds, you still have to account for optics and illusions. In idealist terminology, our experiences are in disagreement with one another as to whether the object's color changes.

What is it about computation, or translations from some sets of symbols to other sets of symbols, that could produce a state of conscious awareness? — jkop

I don't know, but quite a few people think the mind is computable, and don't like the idea of some important mental aspect being unique to human physiology.

Think about it though, if you had control over what one persons actions effected other peoples realities like that you could have quite a lot of control over the entire population while at the same time being completely non-existent to every human being alive. — intrapersona

I like to blame some of my poorer choices on aliens, at any rate.

I never saw a good answer to that, only that idealism is not solipsism, and so has other minds built into it somehow.

If each 'phenomenal world' is entirely dependent on its 'experiencer' then this kind of causal interaction is impossible. — csalisbury

Seemed to me that some of the idealists back on the old board did defend this, and that the Cyrenaics defended that position in ancient Greece.

An experience is a biological phenomena: the identification of something, not an expression of it (eg with pen and paper). — jkop

If we consider some of the claims by transhumanists or AI enthusiasts, then the right sort of computation will result in experience.

Consider the idea of mind uploading. If you could emulate your brain in software, would it have experiences? If so, then would the paper equivalent?

When physics predicts results that have not been empirically verified it is because these predictions exist as a result of the formal logic.
This was what lead to the acceptance of GR in particular, the formal logic predicted things that were eventually empirically verified.
It more like a two way street.
We make formal logic models, and then verify them from observation and vice versa. — m-theory

Right, but observation can also disconfirm. If GR had been contradicted, then the math wouldn't have mattered. So unless there is some deep reason for math and observation to always be in agreement, provided the physicists do the right math, then it's not formal.

will be honest, I have no interest in why you believe that what you said is valid. — m-theory

Physics isn't formal in that physics is derived from (or driven by) experimental results. The wave equation exists because of the double slit and other such experiments. So does GR and every other scientific equation.

You think the brain has some non-physical aspect to it? — tom

I don't know whether non-reductionism is the case or not. Some physicalists ascribe to emergentism at different levels. I'm also not sure whether physicalism is the case. Maybe someone will figure out how to give a physical explanation for consciousness, but maybe not.

In addition to that, I'm skeptical that functionalism is entirely substrate independent. I kind of think that the sort of bodies we have determines the kind of minds we have.

If red is undecidable then Chalmers should not know if he is or is not experiencing it. — m-theory

You're arguing that our self-awareness is necessarily decidable, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to know. So knowledge is decidable.

Denial of known physics is always an option, particularly when there are no consequences that matter. — tom

I'm not aware that physics requires universal computation to be the case, only that some have asserted that all physical processes can be computed. Sounds like an ontological claim to me, but maybe there is a mathematical proof for this?

Even if so, the big challenge would be to show that everything about the living brain is reducible to physics.

I must admit I do not follow you here.
I don't understand why how this is the case? — m-theory

I assumed you were making a Dennettian style argument, which is why you were asking how I knew for certain that I had experiences. Dennett has stated that we don't have any sort of subjective experience. We are the equivalent of p-zombies.

But you might be arguing that subjectivity is reducible to objective, physical processes, which is different from eliminativism about qualia. Chalmers has argued that you can't make such reductions, because experience is not reducible to structure or function, which is similar to saying that the experience of red is not captured by number or shape.

Except that physicalism explains reality with formal logic. — m-theory

By that, you mean it appeals to physics, which is empirically driven?