Stove's Gem. We can only see the world with our eyes, therefore we cannot see the world. — Banno

We cannot see the world as it is, only as it looks to us.

Remember the black cat radiating heat? You don't see a thermal cat.

But I still think the statement that we don't see reality doesn't hold. — Coben

Don't see reality as it is. The bolded part is the key part. We do perceive reality. But we do so from a certain perspective.

will be based on what you think are accurate observations of reality. — Coben

The best we can do is rely on what science reveals about the world. That's an abstracted view, but it gets at the properties and processes of things as they are, if imperfectly.

These I call original or primary qualities of bodies . . . solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.

Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e., by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts

http://www.wutsamada.com/alma/modern/lockquo1.htm — John Locke

Sounds, colors, heat and cold, according to modern philosophy are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/ — David Hume

People universally believe that objects look colored because they are colored, just as we experience them. The sky looks blue because it is blue, grass looks green because it is green, and blood looks red because it is red. As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually “colored” in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive. (Palmer 1999: 95)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/ — Stephen Palmer

If sensations of perception are generated by our biology, then the world we perceive is not the way the world is, but rather the way we humans interact with the world based on the kind of sensory organs and nervous systems our ancestors evovled.

The sparrows dancing from one bit of snow to another are real. Being able to observe that is real.
I am not sure what is being asked for beyond that. — Valentinus

All the stuff sparrows and humans can't sense. Also, how sensation is a relation based on the interaction between reflecting light, eyes and brains, for example. The photons of a narrow range of light look like they are combination of three primary colors for normal sighted humans, because we have three kinds of rods in our eyes. Some birds and other animals have more, and can see a wider range.

I mean, even color blind men can often run through a field with holes, grass lumps, and cow poop and thistles and reach the other side, even after running at great speed, with no injuries and still shiny nikes. It sure seems like to some degree they are seeing the world. And to that degree or in those ways also incredibly well. — Coben

Yes, but what if Sarin gas, deadly radiation or Smallpox were released on the field. Would a person see that?

I know you're not creativesoul but was that an example? (:razz:) — Coben

I have an inner ineffable confidence which cannot be expressed properly in words that if Banno commits to this thread, it will get close to 100.

How's that?

My tetrachromat girlfriend telepathically communicates with her pet robin. I can assure you we most certainly can. — Outlander

Ha!

That's not the interesting question though. The interesting question is, if no-one can see it, is there a world as it is? — Echarmion

Yes, but not one which is perceived. A mathematized world is the best we can do. Even if there are limits to our knowing the world as it is, this doesn't mean there is no way the world is. Epistemology and ontology need not be conjoined at the hip.

Object Oriented Ontology is one such effort under speculative realism which attempts to flesh out things as they are. It starts by noting that all objects are correlated to one another, which means the exact nature of the object is never transmitted, only as it is correlated to another object.

Surely this will be resolved before 100 pages.

What it's like to not exist for p-zombies.

The Friends of Qualia didn't seem to want to engage with that, either. — Banno

I do agree on one thing regarding p-zombies. A world of zombies would not include talk of colors, tastes and pains. And thus, there would be no qualia or hard problem debate. The philosophical zombies could not originate such notions.

I suspect some of you would rather live in that world.

If we keep talking about things as they are, definitely. Very quickly too. — khaled

Is Banno's coffee bitter and sweet as it is? Will defeating Covid be inherently sweet?

This idea can be extended to animals that perceive colors differently. Are they seeing the world as it is? Yes, in relation to their perceptual capabilities. But not necessarily in relation to ours as human beings. — Andrew M

What about in relation to as things are, or at the very least, as modern science describes those things?

It's absurdly ignorant of what we know about how our bodies work, and how differently computers and robots work. — Daemon

There is Ned Block's The Harder Problem of Consciousness using Commander Data from Star Trek as a superficial functional isomorph as discussed in this podcast:

https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2019/07/01/ep219-block-papineau/

Block's argument is that we can't tell whether consciousness is functionally or biologically based, so we couldn't tell whether an android would be conscious.

There's a children's version, one I mentioned earlier, here: The Mark of Zombie

Now, doesn’t all this talk of qualia and consciousness and zombies and non-zombies and hyper-consciousness and dim consciousness and conscious minds and unconscious minds strike you as insane? — Banno

No, but it can be made to sound insane. One should note that the entire article is written from the third person. We only ever hear the reports of the astronauts, without the first person ever being portrayed. And yet we all have first person experiences, so we know what that's like.

The first sort is conscious things – things like you and me, cats and dogs, and chimpanzees and tigers. These things, the conscious things, have experiences: they experience the redness of red, the paininess of pain, the yumminess of yum, and so on. Philosophers call these experiences qualia. Qualia, by definition, are the sole preserve of conscious things. — The Mark of Zombie

Except saying the "redness of red" can be misleading. It's really just pointing out that red, pain and yuminess are the stuff of conscious experiences. It's something more than a detector discriminating color or Siri telling me it's cold outside.

Evidently, it is easy to mistake Dennett as trying to deny the qualitative characters of sensation on the basis that sensations do not have his four special properties, rather than merely denying that sensations have his four special properties. Dennett has introduced this confusion through his misuse of the term 'qualia'. — Luke

Good post. Something that has never been settled in this thread is whether the qualitative characters of sensation inevitably lead to the one or more of the properties Dennett is eager to quine, and whether what's left over from quining is anything more than a functional account.

If there is something more, then the hard problem remains hard, and if there is not, then there is no reason to talk of conscious sensations. What doesn't work is to talk of colors and pains, but pretend this is not a challenge for physicalism.

The Friends of Qualia didn't seem to want to engage with that, either. — Banno

I'll get on with reading the entire paper and get back with a response or two. I'm in the middle of several things, which is causing my qualia to dance about.

...as opposed to being mislead by Platonic forms... — Banno

The forms need not be platonic. They can just be patterns in the physical. I don't think Chalmers is a platoniist. I believe he has a paper defending nominalism.

...which made no sense to me. Why bother with such odd locutions - a sure sign of things going astray. — Banno

Because you're bing misled by ordinary language and the way English phrases sensations as if they were objective.

What's that about, then? — Banno

I agree that structural invariance makes sense, while absent, fading and dancing qualia do not. Chalmers is a functionalist plus qualia.

But some idiot philosopher will say that we cannot know about the bush, only about how it seems to us; as if that meant something. — Banno

I never said only. I pointed out the difference between being sweetened and being horsed. One makes sense, and the other doesn't. Qualia is ours, but the forms belong to the world.

A pattern of behaviour is a thing in your mind? — Banno

If it wasn't in your mind/brain, you wouldn't be behaving.

Indeed, it's the idea that a quale is a "thing in the mind" that is perhaps the target for Dennett. — Banno

Where would you put the quale? I doubt you think brains work any better here.

Do you want us to conclude that, hence, we cannot not talk about the world as it is? — Banno

Sure, if we ignore the last several centuries of scientific discovery, and restrict ourselves to talk of cats, apples and the five elements ...

Because plainly, that does not follow.

If it were so plain, we wouldn't be having this debate ...

Why don't folk present arguments here, instead of innuendo? — Banno

Covid is up next. Think we can make it there ...?

he Fields are merely mathematical concepts with no actual physical properties -- only the potential for real things to emerge when activated by a mysterious "disturbance". — Gnomon

Not quite, we can see the form of magnetic field lines using iron fillings. That's how fields came to be part of physics in the first place.

Stove's Gem. We can't see the world as it really is because we have eyes. — Andrew M

Well, we don't see the empty space between or inside atoms, do we? Nor do we see the electromagnetic field holding the molecules together. Nor do we see any the vast majority of the EM spectrum interacting or passing through objects.

So no, we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we evolved to see it. Even Dennett in some of his later talks agrees with this. He came to favor the computer desktop analogy for how we experience the world. Computer GUIs are metaphors for ease of use in interacting with computers, but files and folders aren't actually icons you click or touch.

That depends on what one's standard is for seeing things as they are. — Andrew M

That's some Protagorean level of sophistry.

How about the healthy person under normal conditions? — Andrew M

But that would just be one mode of several forming the skeptical argument. We could appeal to the healthy person, but then what about other animals? What about super tasters in humans? What grounds any one sensation as the objective true way the world is?

That's why science ended up going the route of abstracting from the subjective world of sensation to the objective one of mathematical properties, structures and functions, or Locke's primary qualities. We have reason to think those don't vary based on the perceiver.

So while I could say I'm sweetened by the honey as a normal healthy human, I cannot say I'm horsed (a saying used to counter ancient skepticism). Because the form and biology of a horse does not depend on my human senses the way color or taste does.

Maybe we can leave this at anomalous monism instead of going another couple rounds over qualia and subjectivity. Either way, there's a non-reducible psychological component.

Brexit here we come!

With that attitude. — bongo fury

Do you think we'll ever be able to reconstruct a book from the ashes of a fire, or unscramble an omelette? Some things are practically intractable.

Can you mix it in your red coffee cup the way you do bitter and sweet qualia?

Glancing over the SEP article, I've never heard that term before. But I tend to agree with what I see there.

No idea what that means. — Banno

Metaphysical beliefs? Come on now! I've been in threads where Platonism was considered meaningless because it had no empirical content to ground the claim that universals exist. Stuff like that, possible worlds, religious beliefs, beliefs about chairs on the other side of the universe, etc.

We're heading towards anomalous monism. — Banno

I don't know what that means? You mean stuff that we call physical? World-stuff? Nature?

I have an expectation that we will defeat Brexit today.

Ah, well I do not think they can succeed, because we can always state beliefs that have no concrete equivalent.

But I think they have a point about perceptual expectations.

...and concrete events can be stated; therefore any belief that ranges over a concrete event also ranges over a statement. — Banno

But they're not always, and never are for other animals (assuming we're the only language users). This way of broadening the definition of beliefs allows for the cat to believe that some better stuff is in the red container thing instead of something worth drinking.

What does a belief consist in? It consists in treating some statement as true. — Banno

This at least has to be part of what a belief consists in, since we all believe things that we do not, and sometimes, cannot act on.

It's not an account of what a belief is! Linking them to perceptual expectations would be. — fdrake

Wait, what? Why does perception need to be part of belief? I believe life exists somewhere outside Earth, but I can't perceive it. I have all sorts of beliefs like that which are not directly tied to any perception on my part, and not always tied to perception on anyone's part, such as life beyond Earth.

I also believe there's a possible world where the present Kind of France is bald, which cannot be perceived.

The other way I tried to approach it with Banno is: if you believe snow is white, is your belief directed towards snow or the statement "snow is white"? — fdrake

The snow, unless it's during one of these discussions.

So what your'e saying in the previous response is that perception involves all sorts of beliefs about the world, but they're mostly not the sort we put into language when acting.

Thanks but I've already eaten. — Daemon

Are you a black hole?

What were you getting at? — Daemon

Not really sure at this point. Something to do about beliefs, statements and states of affairs. Also, minds. I'm trying to throw a monkey wrench in the gears, but not really sure where I come down on this.

I disagree that "The snow is white" is as simple as it looks.

What do you have in mind as counter-example? For example, "I believe that I'm special". Would that count as a belief that is not about a statement?

Neutrinos?