It's not a fact of nature, it's a fact about how we speak. — Isaac

That's good, because I am not speaking about nature. I am speaking about a sentence that I find illogical, the sentence: "I doubt that I exist as a sentient, self-conscious entity". That sentence is logically absurd because a doubt implies some sentient, self-conscious entity holding it.

We declare definitions to be what they are, we could have declared otherwise. — Isaac

You are welcome to produce an alternative definition of "doubt" if you think it useful, but the meaning of the word "doubt" in standard English is a sort of feeling, felt by a human being. It's not about something free-floating in the universe, somewhere between Saturn and Neptune.

Defined conventionally, a doubt without a person holding it is simply a logical impossibility. It makes no sense whatsoever, like "colorless green ideas sleeping furiously".

The folks who think that there no problem at all are welcome to do something more productive with their time than write here that "there is no problem at all", again and again. You could write about a topic you care for, on a problem you actually face in your p-zombitudiness.

I've gotta good book recommendation if you're interested. — frank

Written by a Portuguese, I am sure...

Scandals like that do not fade too quickly in people’s memories. — I like sushi

Scandals like what? Did Lula forget to pay a parking ticket? Cut his head, now!

During this dark period of human history more slaves died in Brasil than everywhere else combined - so the estimations say - Considerably more. It is also believed around 40% of the slaves bound for the americas arrived in Brasil. Mostly men who were, if memory served me, typically castrated and/or worked to death - literally - then simply replaced by more men from Africa. — I like sushi

Makes no actual sense. Slaves were worth a lot of money. What is true though is that the porthuguese started the slave trade, in order to develop Brasil, which is enormous while Portugal is very small. They tried to find slaves everywhere along their extensive trade routes, even in Japan.

The other nations only copied the Portuguese, decades later.

So while the thread is amusing, it is not going to achieve anything like a consensus. I — Banno

LOL. God forbid!

If all we needed to demonstrate the existence of some substantial self in the Cartesian sense was the fact that we speak of "I" and "we" and so on, then it would have been proven long ago and no longer controversial. — Janus

It never was controversial, and it was proven by Descartes a long time ago.

If consciousness is the capacity to analyse... — Banno

... and to observe, and to know, and to doubt. To be confused, to argue, to imagine. And we are doing all of that here.

The tool we bring to the discussion are the subject being discussed. It's like using a wrench to work on a wrench. Hence the bloody mess.

Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?

Because folk bring their baggage with them. — Banno

Rather, because it's about the very baggage they bring into the analysis: their capacity of analysis is the object of the analysis. The reflexiveness of the problem is what makes it so wicked.

We don't 'find out' consciousness is required for doubting, we declare it to be so. — Isaac

That a person needs to hold a doubt for there to be a doubt, is implicit in the definition of doubt: "a feeling of not being certain about something, especially about how good or true it is."

If all you're interested in is how things are then the the claim is "A doubt implies a person having it, a "mind" rejecting a belief. It isn't an independent doubt, free-floating in the universe. — Isaac

Fair enough.

There's no view from no where. No seeming without a seer. No knowledge without a knower. No doubt free floating in the universe, without a doubter.

That's the essence of the cogito as I understand it.

Husserl's version goes a bit like this:

There's no view without a viewer and something being viewed. No knowledge without a knower and something being known. No doubt free floating in the universe, without a doubter and something being doubted.

We are persons, selves, agencies and we are at the world. In the world, busy working on it. That's the given, the fundamental intuition defining our being, our existence, and the point of departure of any philosophy of life. Anything else is escapism.

It doesn't tell us anything about the way things 'must be', only how things are. — Isaac

I don't mind how things must be, I care for how they are.

Although I'm a bit more modest than Descartes; I would say we know that thinking (and feeling and awareness) are going on; the self is a more problematic proposition. — Janus

"We" means a collection of "I"... It's telling that you couldn't express your idea here without using a personnal pronoun.

If one doubts that there is a self, who is doing the doubting? A doubt implies a person having it, a "mind" rejecting a belief. It can't be an independent doubt, free-floating in the universe.

And again I would pick you up on assuming that everyone is the same. What you find yourself able to do is not necessarily representative of human capacities in general. — Janus

Thanks for bringing us back to the original point.

We could both be right, because in life, great diversity can emerge from a very severe economy of means.

There is amazing diversity in life. Millions of species and plenty of genetic variability within species. However when biologists study the anatomy and biochemistry of different species, they find astonishing sameness: the same DNA code, the same fundamental proteins and processes eg respiration and the cycle of Kreps, etc.

All the bright and shinny feathers of all the birds in the world are composed of the same material as your hair and your nails: keratin.

So life produces an explosion of diversity out of a very severe economy of means. Life recycles constantly. This is one of its fundamental characteristics.

It's probably similar in the biological process of thinking: we all use the same basic elements of thoughts. My "I" and your "I" cannot be very different. What you do with it, where you invest your neuronal power, is up to you though.

.

If you are not able to be conscious of your own awareness, then that says something about you, not about others or humans in general. — Janus

As Descartes pointed out, who would be doing the "you" part, then? The doubter cannot doubt his own existence.

:cool:

You may well be right. — T Clark

Just to conclude on the orchestra metaphor, if one trained an infrared camera tied to a computer on an symphonic orchestra, and asked the orchestra to play its repertoire of say, 10 pieces of classical music a number of times, soon enough the computer would be able to tell pieces apart based on the bodily temperature patterns of each player. Like in Vivaldi, the cymbals and the brass stay silent so the respective players are at rest, cool, while the violin players go all heated up. The temperature signature of Bethoven pieces are all ups and downs, while Bach is much more regular and stable in its temperature patterns... But at no time would the computer hear the actual music.

Similarly, an MRI experiment monitoring the energy consumption of various places in the brain of a patient can recognize A from B, or blue from red, when the patient's mind focuses on A or B or blue or red, if it has been trained previously to do so on the patient. But the MRI is not accessing the real thoughts themselves, of an A or a B. It just can tell that the energy consumption signature of an A is different from that of a B in that patient.

So if we want to read people's minds one day, we need a way to listen qualitatively to their music -- the thoughts themselves in whatever materiality they take, be it brainwaves or something else. Not just measure quantitatively the level of effort spent in producing thoughts.

All this to say it's high time neuroscience takes thinking as seriously as musicologists take music. No musicologist worth the name would use orchestra heat scans to explore Mozart.

I imagine it would start very simply with something like what has been studied with the MRI. — T Clark

I would tend to disagree. MRI monitors the intensity of the biological effort made in various places of the brain, but it won't tell you what the result of this biological effort is.

It's a bit like trying to reconstruct a symphony by monitoring the bodily heat of individual orchestra members while they play it. The more effort they put into playing, the more heat their body ooses out. So bodily heat is a good indicator of the level of effort, but not a good indicator of the output of the effort: the actual music.

My money is on listening to brain waves. I believe they are the stuff our consciousness is made of.

Guess I would require a definition of the concept of "family resemblance"... :-)

The pupillary reaction score is just left off in blind people, and those with potential eye damage. — Isaac

So you have a special definition of consciousness for blind folks. Good for them I guess...

I seriously doubt the Portuguese were worse than the British or later the Americans in terms of how they treated slaves. One characteristic of British colonialists was their efforts to portay themselves as better and more humane than other colonialists, such as the Spaniard or the French. It was just propaganda though.

The gulf between the purported complex complete picture of something people believe they have in their mind('visual thinkers' and all that) with what they can describe when asked a few questions about it. — creativesoul

Yes, we are very good at lying to ourselves.

Why can't all the neuronal stuff happen without me thinking I'm having an experience? — bert1

Probably because there is some survival or reproductive value in you having an experience. Our consciousness exists for a reason. That reason may be God, or it may be the Devil, but my guess is that it was shaped by natural selection like the rest of us, and that the reason why we have experiences must be that it gave our distant ancestors some Darwinian advantage over animals lacking it.

They'd need to have eyes, but I don't see any reason they couldn't. — Isaac

None of the computers I know have eyes. Can I conclude that they are definitely not self-aware?

What about people without eyes? Can we classify them as unconscious zombies based on your definition?

Consciousness - The property of scoring 4:5:6 on the Glasgow coma scale. — Isaac

Alright. Would you happen to know if some computers are able to achieve a scoring of 4:5:6 on the Glasgow coma scale, as of today?

Lula has said that Zelenskiy is "as responsible as Putin for the war". — ssu

Which is stupid alright.

I am not really interested in a scale. A scale is merely a measurement tool. I am interested in a definition of consciousness that would be aggreable by most, including you.

It's been like pulling a teeth.

I conclude that such a definition simply does not exist. Which is perfectly normal for a foundational concept. You cannot define "time", "space", or even "life" in a way that everyone will agree. And yet we rely on these concepts every single day.

I was not asking for some name dropping, but for a definition of consciousness that is not vague or slippery.

Oddly some people seem to struggle with it, almost as if they are zombies. I hesitate to say that as it seems so insulting - people lacking a basic concept of what, in part, they are. Even people like 180 Proof and Banno, who are well educated and sophistacated thinkers in many ways, genuinely don't seem to have the concept. I don't really understand it though, I don't know how people can not have it. — bert1

Some people say they don't use foundational concept X, for instance the concept of "truth", and they truly believe that they do not use the concept, while actually using it just like anybody else. They just use it while remaining unaware that they do. IOW, they simply lie to themselves.

if we don't share concepts, it's hard to even get a conversation started in which people are not missing each others points. — bert1

Yes, and in fact, isn't it exactly what we are seeing here, on this and all the other threads on the same subject?

There are several definitions of consciousness I'm happy with. — Isaac

You mind mentioning a few of them?

That's of no help because 'consciousness' is an equally vague and slippery notion defined, it seems, by exactly the same list of things it definitely isn't, but nothing it actually is. — Isaac

Why don't you give it a try then? Make the concept less slippery, if you can.

Me, I consider it perfectly normal to lack a precise definition for a philosophical concept. You probably could not define the word "definition" in a way that isn't vague and slippery.... and yet you keep asking for definitions. :-)

I'm just trying to pin down what this thing 'awareness' is that neuroscience has apparently failed to explain. — Isaac

It's equivalent to the concept of consciousness.

Isn't this just what the 'hard problem' is about? 15 pages of texts and it's back to square 1. — Wayfarer

Read somewhere:

Breaking news: Philosophers give up on hard problem of consciousness -- "it's just too hard!"

Also I can draw a likeness of the face of someone I know well, even if I can't "see" a stable mental picture of it. Same with the human figure; I can draw a very accurate, proportionally and muscularly speaking, image of the human body, male or female. — Janus

Yes, because you've already done it again and again based on a real human body. But if at age 6 or 7, someone had asked you to draw a human body from memory alone, you might have drawn something less accurate... in spite of being perfectly capable already of recognizing a human being when you saw one.

What about when you dream? I would put it more in terms of a VR headset kind of experience, particularly for lucid dreaming. — Marchesk

When you dream, the world 'around' has that dreamlike quality: people are not who they seem, objects and folks evolve into other things. It's usually quite foggy and unstable.

We are a very good public for our own visualizations. We forgive a lot, we convince ourselves of their beauty, even if in truth they are barely there at all.

I believe there is actually an empiric proof of that, of the fact that we cannot visualize very well, even though we convince ourselves that we do visualize really well. I discovered it in primary school. There was this girl I was very found of. She liked my drawings and asked me for one. I decided that instead of drawing Mickey Mouse or Lucky Luke as usual, for her I would draw something nicer, more original: a horse. I thought I knew exactly how it would be, for I had this picture in my mind of a splendid horse. Then I started to draw.

Try as I may, I could not replicate on paper the splendid image I thought I had in my head. I had to find a photo of a horse and draw from it. The result was somewhat ok but I wondered: how come I needed an external picture to copy? Why couldn't I simply copy my mental image?

Introspectingly, I realized that this image was not actually 'there' in my mind.

What was there was an idea of a picture, a dream of it, a mere shadow of a sketch, but I had easily convinced myself that it was the real deal, the full canvas.

If you don't believe me, do your own experiment: chose a person you know well and can recognize easily, then imagine her face, then try and draw it. You might find that you are better at imagining that you can imagine her face, than at producing an actual stable image of her face.

If our dreams were giving us the same rich, full experience that we get from reality, then we would spend all our lives in dreams...

have heard of experiments using MRIs to correlate specific brain patterns with specific words. — T Clark

I was thinking of something more radical, like some science-induced telepathy, which would then allow us to feel what it is to be a bat. There's no telling if we will ever reach that point but I can't see why it would be technically or logically impossible.

In Brasil, specifically. Okay.

What about anywhere else?

They think we are walking around with HD movies in our heads. some people do, — hypericin

I doubt it very much. There's no such thing as "mental furniture", ie some stable, solid mental representation of anything. Our minds are always in flux, like a torrent, or a calmer river. But there isn't any furniture in that river. It's all 'constructed', cheaply but aptly so in a way. That is to say, the system cannot do everything. The system is geared to do certain things and not others, specifically it is focused on tasks that have survival values. For instance, recognition of sensations, ie their interpretation, as fast as possible. When you see a tiger, you can classify it as such really fast, faster than you can imagine a tiger, perhaps because spotting a real tiger nearby is an ability that is more useful to survival than imagining one.

To the degree that it might be useful to imagine a tiger (or anything else), this value is exhausted when I just put some place holder somewhere saying "big striped cat - who will kill you if given a chance". I don't really need the mental canvas, with the tiger painted on it. What would I do with that? Nor even a mental movie would serve any purpose, because if you ask me to imagine a tiger, it's probably because you will then tell me a story about it, or some further detail, so I need my imagining to remain open and fluid.

I read the post and I think the guy is mistaken in assuming that "nearly all of you have a [mental] canvas." I certainly cannot recall with any ease the face of my departed mom. I can imagine a beach in my head but it is not a stable picture, more of a vague, unstable set of gross approximations of the real deal. The same applies to something as elemental as a red triangle. All I can summon in my mind is a vague, flickering shadow of something, that on a good day I can convince myself looks a bit like a red triangle.