I don't understand the difference. — Marchesk

Dennett's representationalism also includes other systems of the body.

These are representations in us that contribute to our cognitive talents without being for us.(In this regard they are no different from the representations of blood sugar level or vitamin deficiency that modulate our digestive systems with-out engaging cerebral cortex at all.) — Dennett 2016:

fwiw, it seems only recent he has started using the word representation at all.

What’s the point of AI producing poetry, no matter how good it might appear to be? Is the success of AI going to be that it’s capable of imitating human capabilities? — Brett

Yes, but it's the greatest hits of human capability. It needs to be remembered these are gadgets in a strong sense. The use of a gadget is whatever you use it for. You could in theory have an endless amount of apps for generating specific material.
An advocate may argue, there is no one writing 12th century poetry in Portuguese so why not relegate it to an app, which is probably true.
But then there is a danger of becoming too mindless. On some level, the experts know it's just a piece of software even if they can't sell it as such. It takes millions upon millions of pics to train an AI (and sometimes failing at that: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/11/gorilla-chimp-monkey-unpersone.html)
whereas a child needs one image. That is a Zebra, job done. There aren't children's books with 4 million zebras in to ensure they understand what they are.

Sure, and that's the cultural context, at least per your view of current poetry. — Noble Dust

It goes without saying in that these are forum posts. Or not, perhaps all our comments will be used as contextless snippets to philosophical google search inquiries.
However the formalism charge still exists. Does AI undo its legitimacy as art?

The poetry reminds me of Jaron Lanier's statements on the Alpha Go player. He states the player isn't competing against AI but is competing against millions of professional players who have contributed to the software. It's actually fairly creepy if you think about it. You can reduce someone to the best moves, throw them into an app and you don't have to deal with any of the yucky human stuff. It's like the incarnation of a far-leftist's caricature of capitalism.

Some think we already hold something incomprehensible to ourselves.
See New Mysterianism.

I think biologically it is a break away from habituated behavior. Sometimes I say something automatically and I know I wasn't thinking when I said it. Or I will do something without my mind really being there. For example, lets say a sink was moved and I'm thinking something else while carrying plates, but because of that something else I put the plates down where they used to be and they all break. For me, it's this lived experience (to use a trending term) that makes me doubt the subconscious mind is really that intelligent at all.
That's why the social term: "think about it" when we screw up makes so much sense to us. We know precisely what the person is talking about.
So it's conscious thought overriding earlier habits and the creation of new information.

I miss the user Apokrisis. He used to give good social-bio explanations for habit-attention.

so that consciousness does not entail content necessarily (it is possible for the theatre to be empty — bert1

The thing is when I have localized anesthetic it doesn't feel like something is missing. It feels like it no longer exists or doesn't belong to me. Like the theatre has been rearranged.

For the existence of consciousness requires complex organic matter. — Vladimir Krymchakov

why organic?

For what it's worth, I'm not saying that we are zombies or denying consciousness. I could be accused of suggesting that a certain hazy way of looking at consciousness has some serious problems that we mostly ignore. You might say that I'm trying to shine some light on the fog as such. — path

Lanier's use of the zombie wasn't important. It's whether consciousness can be computed using the transcript of meteor showers.
I've never found any confusion with consciousness. Imo consciousness has always had the same definition though some may get confused and define it the wrong way. Consciousness is the common sense Aristotle wrote about whether senses are combined together and presented as a phenomenal whole. I knew it as a child though lacked the jargon for it. There was seemingly something odd there that wasn't present within my feet or other organs.
The argument may be that there is no reductionist explanation for binding and phenomenal imagery.

[More can always be said. When I read this next week it won't 'mean' what it 'means' to me now, tho it might be the same-enough for me to plausibly elaborate on it.] — path

Well it's been about a week :). Anyway I don't think the content of experience* is important so much that there is a similar enough framework that has been the same throughout my life (what I described above). That's the consistent part.

*I want to add as well as culture even evolutionary psychological traits can probably be dropped if the brain is on drugs or whatever). I didn't want to focus on them but still want to separate them from the binding problem.

Poetry is so dependent on cultural context. — Noble Dust

Sure, but are are we not moving away from the classic definition of being able to capture the transcendental, the fixed and unchangeable, as in a mimesis, and more towards continentalist theories of art. A lot of poetry is contemplative, meditative, and does seem platonic in its construct. A friend of mine tells me he primarily reads Paradise Lost because of how it assists his own art today.

Btw, on the AI itself, these poems are better (sort of) , but the TalktoTransformer was nonsense 99% of the time. AI just makes me feel like a nihilist. I recall Wayfarer called it the materialist Ahriman.

One of Searle's points is that you can make a computer out of anything - lengths of pipe, water and stones, — Wayfarer

I recall Searle believed minds had to be made of a certain something. I think the analogy he used was pistons. They can't be made from putty. Minds have to exist on certain material.

The problem would be insufficient memory as I understand it. If my network has 10 billion parameters, then I have to store them somewhere. During training I have to be able to update them as the data come in... — path

If you haven't already, you may find this interesting. Particularly the stretching a zombie section.
http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html
So the question being made is, in practice how far can you get? Speed itself shouldn't be an issue because the mind is supposedly an equation. 4+4+4 is 12 even if there is a thousand years between each four. Also some people distinguish between GOFAI and modern neural nets).

they perform calculations - vast numbers at astonishing speeds. But they are no more sentient than calculators. — Wayfarer

Something I've wondered, could our most advanced neural net be performed on our oldest computer, albeit at an extremely slow pace?

This isn't a really a subtlety though. The zombie argument presumes the zombie will always be identical to the other person having the phenomenal experience and, in the case of whatever Dennett thinks up, that includes the neurological substratum that is fooling the rest of the brain that it has qualia.
You can always prove you are conscious to yourself because you are the one experiencing the phenomena you just can't prove it to other people/ give it third person accessibility

Because it builds on "problem of other minds" Chalmers' argument is set up in a way that it can't be refuted. He even said as such to another neuroscientist.

Fwiw, don't bother with Dennett if you're interested in anything mind related. if you look at his earlier psychology work he denies dreams exist during sleep ignoring a lot of empirical evidence they do.

As the means of constantly re-rendering the constantly shifting environment, so as to keep said footing? — Blurrosier

yes, just that.

Or are both ways more or less rephrasing the same thing? — Blurrosier

I'll be able to give a better answer to this soon. I'll make a note of this thread once I have more detail. But I'd say both of those are correct.
Its not a formalized algorithm where consciousness appears somewhere within the chain but something messy, as in all over the place. Which is what you would expect from something created by evolution.

Well consciousness is attention and attention is usually directed at attending a mental event which the autonomic mind could not deal with.
It's not so much dissatisfaction so much that there will always be issues to contend with. How long can a satisfied mind endure before it is taken advantage of or the ground falls from under it?

And my reason also says that all extended objects - such as my brain - can be divided. Yet my reason says no less clearly that my mind cannot be divided. Well, if my brain is divisible but my mind not, then my reason is telling me that my mind is not my brain (or any other kind of extended thing). — Bartricks

Some people like Sperry believe a divided brain creates two individual minds each with consciousness. Like the split brain experiments, what do you say about that?

Many properties only obtain via the interactions of many parts/relations. — Terrapin Station

I'll try to explain better. I've forgotten some of the technical terminology so bare with me.

Aren't properties themselves supervenient on their underlying structure? It seems off for something that is fairly interpretive would have a phenomenal ontological frame of reference.

And even if not (properties not supervenient), it seems odd from an action philosophy perspective too in that an abstract frame of reference of being the thing in question would have physical interaction.
For example: a basin draining water would have countless frames of reference: below the basin, right side of the basin, but the frames of reference wouldn't have a physical effect on the water, in themselves. Whereas with consciousness, it obviously generates endless discussions (like this one).
So if the frame of reference is a vital part of the equation then it includes it having a physical effect.

Yes, mental properties are from the frame of reference of being (identical to) a particular brain. — Terrapin Station

I understand frame of reference in epistemic terms, but I don't really get how distinct things can have a phenomenal frame of reference. Brains are contiguous and electrons don't care what they are part of.

Frames of reference — Terrapin Station

So do you believe consciousness = mental/neurological properties + the specific frame of reference of those properties?

There has always been epistemic solutions to consciousness in psychology and neurology. Top-down descriptions exist over any good neurobiology text book.
The "conscious problem" in philosophy has always been more ontological, how something that exists as neurons firing (or let's go further to their atomic and subatomic substitutes) appears as a unified phenomenal experience. A revolution like that is probably not going to appear in neuroscience.

This just goes into the free will argument. I didn't consent to my mind you're correct. Though it was pre-existing as potential genetic code and the cultural archetypes that formed it. I also (and still do) consciously make decisions knowing it would become something like it is now.
And personal responsibility is just a social construct, it's not really innate. Some artists these days don't even claim to be responsible for the stuff they make because they believe it was subconscious or whatever.

Yep, same thing in b-theory of time I believe. They're all Parmenidean arguments.

So the world of reason is describing a different world to the one our senses display to us which is one of motion and change.

Yeah, long before I read about p-zombies or even solipsism — Marchesk

I think anyone who has ever had a dream would be aware of zombies or solipsism. Children today play VR so they are more familiar with the concepts.

The mind/body problem I discovered myself at a young age. I was reading the back of a science book and it was about Cajal's discoveries of the brain being contiguous rather than a complete living thing. So I was wondering how everything pieced together as one experience. Before that I believed thinking was some type of continuous electrical field.
I can't take Ryle's stuff seriously. There is obviously a full phenomenal world with thinking that exists beyond our culture/ the way we are trained to talk about thinking.

Wittgenstein might be considered an eliminativist. Anyway I'd probably say the meaning of words are how they are used (that part is correct) but the functions exist prior to the language and that can be examined for philosophical analysis. Applying it to everything is just silly. I also would say that words don't create new ideas in themselves they are referencing something existing that the person simply hadn't considered.
A lot of times in philosophy, I stumble upon something I came up with before on my own but didn't know the communal terms to describe it.

Something interesting about category errors.
If one asks "what color are orgasms?" people might say it's nonsensical. Yet people do have synesthesia so it's possibly a real phenomenon for some people and not others.

Yeah, a philosophy text. — Terrapin Station

It probably would be better if forums like this supported nested comments. Then people could interact with your crits freely without letting it interrupt the reading. That's one of the big reasons why reddit has succeeded in replacing the classic forum because nested discussions are almost impossible to hijack.

Anyway, I would be interested in a reading group for the complete Hegel book provided we can decide on a free pdf/html translation online. This doesn't seem to be the case with OP.

We haven't solved the easy problem yet.

Internet forum culture seems to be dying out (even this one is a quasi-backup of an earlier one which closed). They will probably be a footnote if anything.
Social media is obviously fairly important to developmental psychology and developmental psychology is lifelong. I've seen elderly people become very different people once they got online and could hide their biological age.

that credits Dennett and P. Churchland — Marchesk

I think P.Churchland has a vastly different view to Dennett in that he sees the direct empirical experience as being more informationally rich than our folk psychology can account for. For example, a description of Pat's son by the fire:

one evening when Mark was three or four, he and Paul were sitting by the fire—they had a fire every night in Winnipeg in the winter—and Paul was teaching him to look at the flames like a physicist. He told him how the different colors in the fire indicated different temperatures, and how the wood turned into flame and what that meant about the conversion of energy. The boy was fascinated; but then it occurred to Paul that if he were to sit in front of a fire with a friend his age they would barely be able to talk to each other. — Churchland

Dennett in contrast believes that most of our minds are built up out of cultural memes.

Actually, that doesn't follow at all. The only thing that follows from "our experience of the world is not immediate" is itself: our experience of the world is not immediate. — Terrapin Station

Well that section isn't sourced unlike other parts which contains a direct quote from Dennett's new book. I did some googling but could not find the original. It's probably original content based around Libet's free will experiment or something.

Yes, but Dennett has other arguments where it becomes clear he is arguing that consciousness is an illusion. — Marchesk

When he says illusion in recent years, he literally means user illusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_illusion

It's difficult to unpack a lot of what Dennett says. Searle once said it took him a while to get what he was driving at when reading one of his essays.

but it's not clear just what the view is that he's denying — Terrapin Station

The closest to definition he comes is here which he describes as fourfold.

"Qualia are: "(1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness"

The experiments are less about illusion and more supposed to show the defenders of qualia are failing to meet that definition.

The first is why we don't see any evidence for aliens. — Marchesk

We also don't have any independent lineage of life existing on earth that we aren't descended from. We also have failed to recreate it even with all the king's horses and men going at it.
It seems likely life is something extremely rare and I don't see why that isn't recognized or taken into account, like ever.

Okay, but again, in the "what does that have to do with" department, what does that have to do with saying that consciousness is an illusion, with denying qualia, with denying the incorrigibility of subjective experience qua subjective experience, etc.? — Terrapin Station

So Quning Qualia quote 1:

"Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia."

Quote 2:

(in relation to Coffee taste quale intuition pump)
"It seems easy enough, then, to dream up empirical tests that would tend to confirm Chase and Sanborn's different tales, but if passing such tests could support their authority (that is to say, their reliability), failing the tests would have to undermine it. The price you pay for the possibility of empirically confirming your assertions is the outside chance of being discredited. The friends of qualia are prepared, today, to pay that price, but perhaps only because they haven't reckoned how the bargain they have struck will subvert the concept they want to defend."

It seems in quote 1 he is arguing against a specific kind of conscious experience. The second quote seems too suspiciously like the change blindness videos which he showed to philosophers that I believe that's what he is referring to.

But that approach isn't going to do anything but preach to the choir. — Terrapin Station

There isn't really any other way he can present empirical evidence for his theory that the brain is just a big parallel processing machine with the right kind of information being copied from place to place. It's more or less saying, this is what the world will seem like if I am right.

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf — Marchesk

These are representations in us that contribute to our cognitive talents without being for us.(In this regard they are no different from the representations of blood sugar level or vitamin deficiency that modulate our digestive systems with-out engaging cerebral cortex at all.)
-Dennett

This is a curious quote from that essay. He's pretty much stating that the "higher" levels of biology are real beyond the way we interpret and think about stuff.

What does not noticing that have to do with qualia? — Terrapin Station

It fits more into a behavioral, functionalist epistemology. The focus is on its use in a given behavior but not the individual bundle of "quales" it is made out of. (So the person might know they are looking at a museum but not notice its furniture has been changed around).
The perception experiments are supposed to persuade people to think what gives the better explanation for consciousness.

All it shows is that consciousness doesn't accurately report the external world 100% of the time — Terrapin Station

I think the idea is that the person doesn't know if their qualia has changed or how it has. We can agree that "color" is a quale right? I recall one change blindness experiment changed a sign in a photo from yellow to grey (or something like that) and no one noticed. The point is that the conscious states are really teleofunctional-states and not made up of bundles of qualia.

But I think the sword cuts both ways, as a good skeptic would be sure to point out. — Marchesk

He knows that minds are shaped haphazardly (sort of) by evolution so he has faith in the scientific method before all else because it removes much of the bias.
He is skeptical on AI too for some of the same reasons.

I believe Dennett is making a statement about the ontology of Qualia, akin to Quine. The intuition pump about the coffee tasters in Quining Qualia pretty much sums that up.
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm
All the perception stuff Dennett shows in his videos is to show people can't be sure about their qualia and if they can't be sure about that then how can they commit to it being real.
Is that an issue for epistemology? Sure but there are other paths one can take like pragmatic realism

Re Bennett and Hacker and their mereological fallacy, they say: — Terrapin Station

It's been a while since I read it but from what I recall the book was overtly behaviorist. It identifies psychological properties by their use.

Depends on which part pf PoM.
Baars: A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness is the best scientific book on consciousness I've read albeit it's slightly old now.

Could it be as simple as why bees and not just flowers?
What I mean is could it be due to the existence of multi-cell organisms that single cell organisms still thrive. The same thing with societies and individuals. An individual mind came up with the theory of relativity but it needed something to nurture it to that point.