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What if blue doesn't particularly feel like anything to me? It is just data about where some reflected light is on the visible spectrum. Any emotional or subjective content of "blueness" is apt to be a product of personal associations of experiences (emotional or esthetic) I had in the presence of blueness, not the nature of blueness itself.
I suppose we can then regress to discussing the quality of "blue skies" or "my lover's blue eyes" but those are simply emotional / attachment responses that don't seem to require qualia to explain them.
The word 'feeling' and the expression "feels like" are common in these discussions because it is difficult to reference subjective/qualitative experience using public language, but using these terms can also be slightly misleading in the context of these types of discussions. The word 'feel' in this context is not meant to be limited to just emotional feelings, as in, "I feel miserable" or "I feel happy." The word 'feel' is also meant to convey sensation/perception types of experiences - as in "I feel a pain in my foot" or "I feel the presence of someone staring at me from behind", or "I feel lost."
Personally, I think that cognition is never actually separable from emotions, but that's beside the point because whether or not emotions are responsible for what blue "feels like" for me is irrelevant. What matters is just the qualitative experience itself, however you wish to label it or analyze it. Indeed, the "feeling" that I'm referring to (I prefer the term 'subjective/qualitative experience' rather than "feeling") does not need to be labeled or analyzed in order to be experienced. KC said it well: "...people feel what they feel when they have a feeling." That's all that I'm talking about.
And tsig hits the nail on the head as well when he says:
Quote:
Originally Posted by tsig
IOW everyone sees the world from their own perspective.
Seems rather a tautology.
A quale is a constituent element of your current experience, insofar as you are able to reference the subjective/qualitative experience of the moment. To recast KC's quote: Qualia just are what people experience when they experience what they experience. If I believe that I feel a pain on my back, I could be wrong about many things concerning the nature of this experience (insofar as I try to interpret the cause of the experience, or rationally categorize the experience in objective terms), but I can't be "wrong" about simply experiencing what I experience when I experience it. The experience just is what it is. People with brain damage, and people who are subjects in very clever psychology experiments can be amazingly wrong about the nature of their experiences. A person can, for example, attribute pain to a spot on the surface of a table. (A pin is actually poking their hand, but thanks to a clever experimental setup, the pain feels to them as though it is coming from a spot on the table in front of them.) Wow! It's hard to be more totally wrong about the nature of a subjective/qualitative experience than that! But notice that it is still a "raw feels" experience. The pain is still a qualitative element of my subjective experience, even if it feels to me as though it is located in the surface of the table.
And, again, I want to emphasize that this doesn't mean that qualia are some weird non-physical stuff floating separately from physical events. I believe that qualia ARE physical processes, and thus they can be studied scientifically. But, like all physical objects, qualia can be studied from multiple perspectives. You and I can both study my qualia from many different perspectives. But there is something weird about qualia - something that is simply not true of other types of physical events. Each individual subject, at any given moment, can take a perspective on qualia that no other physical process can take, and when the subject "looks at" their own qualia from this perspective, they can notice properties that can only be perceived from the perspective of conscious subjects. One reason for this weirdness can be understood fairly simply: When I focus my awareness on my own qualitative experience, I am engaging in a form of self-reference. My brain is a qualitative system that is referencing its own qualitative nature. My proposal is that the only types of physical systems that can experience qualitative/subjective experiences are complex physical systems that are capable of self-reference. The physical world just isfundamentally qualitative, but the only types of physical systems capable of experiencing the fundamentally qualitative world as qualitative are certain types of self-referencing systems - specifically: self-organizing, world-modeling/perceiving, self-referencing systems.
What makes the subjective aspect of qualitative reality so hard to discuss in public language is that each self-referencing language-user can only turn its awareness toward its own existence as a self-referencing process. This is a firm logical constraint given the meaning of "self-reference." System X is the only system that can self-reference system X.
And, once again to be clear: I don't see this as an argument against machine consciousness. I see is as a speculative path of theory-construction that might eventually play a role in helping us to build conscious machines.
The trap is easily explained. Language is about reference and universal human experience IS the reference in many ways. Including our experience of "blue". Therefore to ask someone to explain using our language, the experience of "blue", is much akin to the Irish Mother crying out "Look at your face". You can not do it. Not because of the mysteries of qualia, but solely because you are asking the reference point to view itself.
So while the purveyor of this canard and trap is trying to highlight some import of the concept of "qualia" what they are actually merely achieving is highlighting a limitation in our communication methods.... the limitation of using something entirely based on references to self reference those references.
Well put. Humans have a unique level of self-awareness, but it is not perfect and has limitations. The philosophical "hard problem" can be seen as a reflection of the limitation of language and symbolic processing. Trying to reason around the "hard problem" is difficult only in the sense that expressing any idea in human language is difficult to a chimpanzee, because the chimp lacks the speech centers to properly express even chimp, much less human, conceptualizations. Similarly we humans lack the evolved ability to work with recursive self references in the way that you're describing.
As usual, I suspect that in this case, as in others, the seemingly mystical and mysterious just ends up being human incapability or weakness. It is less humbling to ignore our limitations AS limitations and make up campfire stories about What It All Means.
Just as I can't disprove god but think him highly unlikely, I can't disprove that consciousness does not have some ineffable quality provided by the properties of its vessel being a living organism -- but think it highly unlikely that this is the case. Consciousness of human quality and amplitude is the result of eons of evolutionary tweaking and there is no real reason to imagine that our inability to reproduce something equivalent in the AI field is a result of anything other than not having had enough time, computing power and experimental success to reproduce self-aware machine sentience in just the 2 or 3 generations since computers were invented. It will happen in time.
The inability of a completely sightless (for their entire life) person to comprehend color illustrates the greater overall limitations of human comprehension. A sightless person has absolutely no comprehension of color: Can you think of a literal way to describe color in a non-visual way? I can't. Sure, we can associate certain emotions with color -red=angry, blue=sad, etc.- but these association are arbitrary and don't convey the essential essence of color.
My point is that even those of us with the normal full sensory spectrum have limitations. As physical beings, everything we can perceive and experience must also be of a physical nature. To assert that some component of our being transcends physical existence has no basis in evidence or logic.
Language is about reference and universal human experience IS the reference in many ways. Including our experience of "blue". Therefore to ask someone to explain using our language, the experience of "blue", is much akin to the Irish Mother crying out "Look at your face". You can not do it. Not because of the mysteries of qualia, but solely because you are asking the reference point to view itself.
We seem to agree that the root of the problem is self-reference. I do not agree, however, that a brain is like a face in the sense that a face cannot look at itself without a mirror. Unlike a face, a brain is - as you point out - a referencing type of system. A brain is sensitive to inputs from the environment, and it learns to categorized inputs in light of various goal-directed purposes. This capacity for categorization turns raw physical effects (impacting the body/brain) into symbols representing possible goal-directed behaviors. This is the essence of "reference" - symbols represent things and the things that are represented are the things referenced by the brain.
Representation is a symbol-making activity within the brain.
Reference (or "referring to"/"intentionality") is a behavioral (or proto-behavioral) attention-focusing type of activity that is directed toward the things that initiate symbol-making (i.e., "the world" insofar as it has impacted the brain).
Language does not represent anything or reference anything. People use language to engage in representation and reference (which, without people, is just a bunch of meaningless marks on paper or vibrations in the air). The word 'blue' does not reference anything; it is not "about" anything. An embodied act of using the word 'blue' is an act of reference. Implicit in the act of reference is an embodied being who engages in the act for some purpose. The only types of physical systems that can reference things are systems that represent things in the context of goal-directed behavior or potential behavior.
A photoreceptive cell (whether organic or electrical/mechanical) that is sensitive to blue light can respond to blue, but it cannot, for itself, represent blue or refer to blue. The cell could play a role in a larger representational system, but it is not, in itself, a representational system. (Analogy: A water molecule can play a role in manifesting the liquid properties of water, but a water molecule, in itself, is not a liquid.) Just as the word 'blue' does not represent blue unless there are people to use the word for that purpose, the photoreceptive cell does not represent blue unless there are other systems around to employ the cell for that purpose.
The brain mechanisms that select targets and thereby engage the brain in acts of reference are capable of engaging the brain in acts of self-reference. Sure, there will always be "blind spots" due to a type of paradox inherent in self-referential systems (Gödel found "blind spots" in mathematics, for example), but, generally speaking, brains are paragon examples of self-referencing systems.
I do not agree, however, that a brain is like a face in the sense that a face cannot look at itself without a mirror.
Then you must be over joyed to find out I never made any such claim about the brain and therefore you have moved to disagree with something you yourself have invented, and I never once said.
I was making that claim about our language and how we use it.
And I was making the claim that philosophical canards by charlatans are based on this limitation of our language, by acting like our inability to use a referential language to describe it's own reference points..... somehow acts like there is something mystical and magical and philosophically relevant ABOUT those reference points..... in order to justify their own empty navel gazing..... while also dodging the important part of the discussion, which I laid out at the end of my post, and you simply did not reply to.
The word 'feeling' and the expression "feels like" are common in these discussions because it is difficult to reference subjective/qualitative experience using public language, but using these terms can also be slightly misleading in the context of these types of discussions. The word 'feel' in this context is not meant to be limited to just emotional feelings, as in, "I feel miserable" or "I feel happy." The word 'feel' is also meant to convey sensation/perception types of experiences - as in "I feel a pain in my foot" or "I feel the presence of someone staring at me from behind", or "I feel lost."
Personally, I think that cognition is never actually separable from emotions, but that's beside the point because whether or not emotions are responsible for what blue "feels like" for me is irrelevant. What matters is just the qualitative experience itself, however you wish to label it or analyze it. Indeed, the "feeling" that I'm referring to (I prefer the term 'subjective/qualitative experience' rather than "feeling") does not need to be labeled or analyzed in order to be experienced. KC said it well: "...people feel what they feel when they have a feeling." That's all that I'm talking about.
And tsig hits the nail on the head as well when he says:
A quale is a constituent element of your current experience, insofar as you are able to reference the subjective/qualitative experience of the moment. To recast KC's quote: Qualia just are what people experience when they experience what they experience. If I believe that I feel a pain on my back, I could be wrong about many things concerning the nature of this experience (insofar as I try to interpret the cause of the experience, or rationally categorize the experience in objective terms), but I can't be "wrong" about simply experiencing what I experience when I experience it. The experience just is what it is. People with brain damage, and people who are subjects in very clever psychology experiments can be amazingly wrong about the nature of their experiences. A person can, for example, attribute pain to a spot on the surface of a table. (A pin is actually poking their hand, but thanks to a clever experimental setup, the pain feels to them as though it is coming from a spot on the table in front of them.) Wow! It's hard to be more totally wrong about the nature of a subjective/qualitative experience than that! But notice that it is still a "raw feels" experience. The pain is still a qualitative element of my subjective experience, even if it feels to me as though it is located in the surface of the table.
And, again, I want to emphasize that this doesn't mean that qualia are some weird non-physical stuff floating separately from physical events. I believe that qualia ARE physical processes, and thus they can be studied scientifically. But, like all physical objects, qualia can be studied from multiple perspectives. You and I can both study my qualia from many different perspectives. But there is something weird about qualia - something that is simply not true of other types of physical events. Each individual subject, at any given moment, can take a perspective on qualia that no other physical process can take, and when the subject "looks at" their own qualia from this perspective, they can notice properties that can only be perceived from the perspective of conscious subjects. One reason for this weirdness can be understood fairly simply: When I focus my awareness on my own qualitative experience, I am engaging in a form of self-reference. My brain is a qualitative system that is referencing its own qualitative nature. My proposal is that the only types of physical systems that can experience qualitative/subjective experiences are complex physical systems that are capable of self-reference. The physical world just isfundamentally qualitative, but the only types of physical systems capable of experiencing the fundamentally qualitative world as qualitative are certain types of self-referencing systems - specifically: self-organizing, world-modeling/perceiving, self-referencing systems.
What makes the subjective aspect of qualitative reality so hard to discuss in public language is that each self-referencing language-user can only turn its awareness toward its own existence as a self-referencing process. This is a firm logical constraint given the meaning of "self-reference." System X is the only system that can self-reference system X.
And, once again to be clear: I don't see this as an argument against machine consciousness. I see is as a speculative path of theory-construction that might eventually play a role in helping us to build conscious machines.
It kind of reminds me of the fall from Eden, that we are somehow different that the rest of the pieces of the universe. Like a Lego toy car is special and a Knex car isn't a real toy car because the Lego has turned in something special. When in actuality the Lego car only sold more because of a few economic evolution considerations.
if the state of our brain machine can "tune into" this quail then there is no reason that a "machine" won't be able to do it also. As I said before, machines actually "see" better than us in may wayz today and only are missing the processor for now. When the process matches ours, and it will within 200 or less, they will tap into this quail more completely and thus be more "aware" than humans. Should this thing exist.
In stead of looking at what our "awareness" may be gray try looking at how we handle error compared to a computer.
And I was making the claim that philosophical canards by charlatans are based on this limitation of our language, by acting like our inability to use a referential language to describe it's own reference points..... somehow acts like there is something mystical and magical and philosophically relevant ABOUT those reference points..... in order to justify their own empty navel gazing..... while also dodging the important part of the discussion, which I laid out at the end of my post, and you simply did not reply to.
Sorry about that. I guess I did go off on a weird misinterpretation. So now it seems to me that we are even more in agreement that I thought. I didn't respond to the last part of your post because I didn't see much to argue about. I see no reason why life couldn't be created in a lab, and I see no good reason to think that machines couldn't be designed to be self-organizing, self-referencing systems with goals and values, so as far as I can tell, we are on the same page with this. I also don't see anything mystical or magical about the "self" - the "center" of the self-reference loop. I don't believe in an immaterial soul, for example.
Having said all of this, I do, however, have to admit to a certain "mystical" element in my thinking. I see it as a harmless sort of mysticism - a sort of mysticism that is not in the least bit in conflict with science - although I have argued that some new theories will be needed. Anyone who understands science should not be shocked to hear that some fundamental new theories might still be needed. As a philosopher and sci-fi writer, part of my job (aside from artistic expression and the mundane business of selling books) is to explore speculative ideas that might inspire some real-life scientists to make creative leaps that eventually lead to scientific progress. For most of this thread I've been brainstorming about ways to introduce qualitative (or proto-qualitative) aspects to fundamental physics. Most of you seem to think that this sort of thing is utterly unnecessary, and KC has rightly raked me over the coals for being vague about how the heck such a thing could even make any sense. It's a fair question, and I've offered nothing but the vaguest hint of a wildly speculative answer. Perhaps I am, in fact, a lunatic and I'm completely wasting my time trying to solve a problem that isn't even a problem. Oh well, if this is true, then I'm at least grateful for being locked into a reasonably fun sort of insanity.
As for the "mystical" element in my thinking: On an average day I experience at least a dozen or so moments of wide-eyed awe and deep amazement over the brute fact of my existence. And even between these moments, there is this on-going, low-level background feeling of gratitude for the simple fact of being. Philosophers have expressed this as the "question": "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" I put "question" in scare quotes because, although it is a sentence that starts with "Why" and ends with a question mark, it is not really a question. A genuine question is something that we can at least vaguely imaging finding an answer to. The existential question is not a question in this sense. It is, in fact, just a way of expressing existential awe. One can think of it as an infinite spiral of "why" questions. For every conceivable answer to any given question, you can always go one level deeper and once again ask why. E.g., if the Big Bang answers why, then a child could easily ask why the Big Bang banged. If "God" is the answer, then the child could ask why God exists. And so on.
Now, to really understand my perspective, you need to add a parallel dimension to the "Existential Why". Wondering why we exist is just half of the question. The other half is roughly this: Why are we aware of the existential question? Why do we feel the emotional force of the question? It seems that life is a contingent - not a necessary - part of reality. It seems that the BB could have banged, etc., but by sheer dumb luck it could have been the case that no sentient life ever evolved anywhere. It seems perfectly plausible to think that Existence could have been an infinite system of lifeless, and thus non-experiencing, matter/energy.
Accounting for the emergence of complex material systems given physics as we know it is relatively easy, but there is nothing inherent in our concepts of gravity, electromagnetism, etc., that accounts for why complex systems should feel damage as being painful.
Certainly, if self-replicating systems evolve, we would expect them to exhibit behavior that reduces physical damage to the system. Natural selection requires systems to pursue some things and avoid others. Certainly, if something like "feeling" is possible, then we would expect Natural Selection to put these potentials for feelings to good use - a system that associates pleasurable types of feelings with beneficial circumstances and painful feelings with harmful circumstances will survive and reproduce better than a system that does the opposite. But the potential for feeling appears to be a contingent - not a logically necessary - aspect of physical reality, insofar as we understand it in terms of the known laws of physics. How do we model the potentials for feeling in physics? We can model the emergence of complex, high-level patterns of activity because this potential is logically implicit in physics as we currently understand it. Give the reality of some entity X, we can rationally assume that a perfect physical theory of everything must imply the potential for X. If the our theory does not imply the potential or X, then it does not adequately explain the existence of X.
Feelings (the "raw feels" of experience) are real. I believe that physics can and eventually will account for the emergence of feelings in the universe. But you can't explain the emergence of X without including X-like, or proto-X-like elements in your explanation. I'm simply trying to speculate about what would be required in order for physics to explain the emergence of raw feels. This explanation will not remove the double-pronged existential awe buried in the infinite loop of Why questions, but it might help us to build conscious machines who, themselves, could join us in experiencing the awe of being here.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 12-17-2014 at 08:28 AM..
Having said all of this, I do, however, have to admit to a certain "mystical" element in my thinking.
And it is to that part of your thinking I addressed my concerns about the use of the limitations of language, as a way to make "qualia" or human experience seem more magical and mystical than it actually is. Because the thread is about whether robots could be conscious and it seems the only objection on offer to the idea that could be, or might ever be, is this notion that "qualia" or self is simply too mystical and special and magical to be re-created artificially.
And I merely point out, that in the context of this thread, no argument to support that objection has yet been offered. Except attempts, such as the one just mentioned, to deepen this feeling that "qualia" and self are simply too special and deep and mystical and magical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
I see no reason why life couldn't be created in a lab, and I see no good reason to think that machines couldn't be designed to be self-organizing, self-referencing systems with goals and values, so as far as I can tell, we are on the same page with this.
And yet the sole cheerleader of your posts on the thread is very much at odds with this and declares by decree it simply can not be done ever. Which leads me to suspect that we are not as much on the same page as you might want to believe.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
sci-fi writer, part of my job
Anything I might have read? I am periodically a heavy reader of the genre. In bouts and bursts that can be intense but relatively short lives. So I consume quite a few books on the topic in short spaces of time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
I've offered nothing but the vaguest hint of an answer.
Likely because that is all we CAN offer at this time. We simply do not fully understand the operations of consciousness and the human mind and therefore we can not really offer anything but vagueness on how we might ever reproduce it. As you point out, more data/theories are needed.
The idea we can reproduce it all is speculative at this time, so the nature of discourse on the topic will reflect that. So the only people one can actually take substantive issue with are those people who declare some current aspects of science, or some attribute of consciousness, specifically preclude us ever being capable of reproducing it.
Such people simply do not have a leg to stand on, as has been demonstrated by some observed wholesale dodging of being taken to the mat on their objections.
Language however actually might be the key to the reproduction of consciousness in machines. If you have not already, I would heartily recommend reading The Tell Tale Brain by VS Ramachandran as he explores from the perspective of a neuroscientist what makes us uniquely human, and hypothesises directly, and through quoting the works of others, how different parts of our brain evolved, what those differences between our brains and similar examples in the animal world are and imply, and how the rise of human consciousness and "free will" might have arisen from these changes.
And one thing that he comes back to often, from his own work and citations of works from many other people (Stephen Pinker for example) is a co-evolution of language and consciousness and reason. That the evolution of each had to step to match the evolution of the others. And therefore a true understanding of language and linguistics at the level of the brain is paramount in understanding human consciousness.
The other avenue of course is mirror neurons and other aspects of the brain evolved with the "purpose" of representing the minds of others in a brain. Another faculty that is also imperative for the evolution of language too, as it happens, as communication essentially relies on it. But as soon as a faculty evolves that is capable of representing the minds of others, adopting their perspective, and running simulations on how they might think and act..... then it is a short simply step for that faculty to start creating representations of itself.... and you suddenly have recursive self-reference..... and the world of "consciousness".
But as I keep pointing out NONE of this is precluded an artificial machine. So the position adopted by those who simply can not abide the claim AI or machine consciousness could ever be possible..... is as alien to me as it is entirely (by them) unsubstantiated.
I can only surmise that their position is not adopted on the basis of reason.... but on the basis of emotion.... and a strong desire for human consciousness to BE something.... magical and ineffable..... ignited by the spark of god itself........... and an artificial reproduction of it therefore would be philosophically abhorrent to their world view and corrosive to it's very foundation..... and perhaps the human race is not this special thing, seperate and above the animal kingdom..... like they really want and need it to be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
On an average day I experience at least a dozen or so moments of wide-eyed awe and deep amazement over the brute fact of my existence.
Nor are you alone in this. I share those experiences with you both in terms of depth and frequency.
Not just moments of awe either. But almost William Burroughs like moments of seeing with extreme clarity the sheer absurdity of it all. An outside in view that will suddenly over come one at mundane moments when suddenly the whole of existence drips with a pure absurdity.
The most recent one was when fueling my car. The sheer absurdity of the idea that I was standing there pumping liquid dead species into a metal box in order for it to propel me between two points in space time faster than I could attain without it, so I could perform in my employment and obtain paper representing the human concept of monetary value..... all so I could purchase further dead animals to pump into my own "gas tank".......... suddenly overwhelmingly seemed to be the very embodiment of the absurd. The whole construct of life is patently ridiculous in those moments. Then suddenly it goes away and while you can essentially recall the essence of the feeling, you can not recall it to experience.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
A genuine question is something that we can at least vaguely imaging finding an answer to.
And the question itself contains an entirely baseless assumption at its core which belies the nature of human thinking. The assumption is that "nothing" is the default and "something" has to be explained. The question is just as likely to be entirely backwards. So usually when I am asked "why is there something rather than nothing" I simply reply with "why would you expect there to be nothing".
And if my understanding of the work of people like Laurence Krauss are to be believed, modern science is legitimizing my come back as at the quantum level you simply can not have "nothing". The moment you do, "something" explodes out of it.
But as such scientists point out, the "why" question is the wrong one in the first place. "Why" implies a reason, a goal, a design. And no such assumption is warranted. Krauss and others much prefer to ask HOW in place of the why here. In other words it is pointless to ask why we exist, rather we should acknowledge merely THAT we exist, and ask how this came to be.
All moving VERY far away from the thread topic here now though and I get the feeling most of what you wrote in your post was not written to reply to me, or discuss anything the thread is actually about..... but merely because you genuinely enjoyed writing it
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
Feelings (the "raw feels" of experience) are real. I believe that physics can and eventually will account for the emergence of feelings in the universe.
That is assuming the "feelings" are real things that require explanations and not just an emergent illusion of the system. Perhaps we are not actually feeling anything but are merely in a system state that declares to us we are and other system states act accordingly and that layered, iterative and self referencing illusionary system is what we now call consciousness.
All moving VERY far away from the thread topic here now though and I get the feeling most of what you wrote in your post was not written to reply to me, or discuss anything the thread is actually about..... but merely because you genuinely enjoyed writing it
Very true. I enjoy scientific and philosophical discussions, but, frankly, I don't see high levels of that in this forum. I'm here for some obscure and purely selfish reasons. Mystic sometimes applauds me for "teaching" to the heathens, but I don't see myself doing any such thing. I'm simply tinkering with ways to express ideas that are notoriously difficult to put into words. I generally feel like I'm failing miserably in this endeavor. You guys are probably the toughest audience in the world. I've spent time with scientists and philosophers and, I must say, those folks are marshmellowy push-overs compared to you guys. Most scientists, in casual conversation, are stark-raving mystics compared to me, but in this forum I'm seen as parading outlandishly occult gibberish. But, as I said, I'm really writing in this forum for my own amusement and practice (sorta analogous to playing scales in preparation for playing music). I go off on tangents that I generally see as being related to the thread, but I couldn't blame a moderator one bit for kicking me out, if they wanted to do so.
I grew up in northern Minnesota. I've fallen through thin ice a couple of times, wrecked snowmobiles, tumbled out of trees. I shouldn't have survived childhood, but here I am. "Crash 'n' burn" seems to be my motto. Rinse and repeat. I guess you've seen some of that here. I couldn't blame any of your for growing weary of me. But I gotta keep on truckin'.
If you have not already, I would heartily recommend reading The Tell Tale Brain by VS Ramachandran....
I've read quite a bit of his stuff, but not that one. I will certainly check it out.
Quote:
And one thing that he comes back to often, from his own work and citations of works from many other people (Stephen Pinker for example) is a co-evolution of language and consciousness and reason. That the evolution of each had to step to match the evolution of the others. And therefore a true understanding of language and linguistics at the level of the brain is paramount in understanding human consciousness.
I would agree, insofar as human consciousness is concerned, but I see human consciousness as a higher-level phenomena merging from lower-level sentience (I.e., raw-feely pre-linguistic qualitative experience), and it's the raw feels that pose the problem I'm trying to articulate. The human mind is capable of taking the "raw-feely" elements of experience and perceiving them as if they are "objects." I see this process of objectification as a source of profound illusion. This process gives us the feeling that we see objects, but there are no such objects. Qualia are not objects - or, at least, they are not objects of the sort that they seem to be. A quale is an immensely complex physical process, and most of this process is not perceivable from the perspective of someone introspecting the raw feel of this or that element of experience. And, furthermore, the tiny tip of the ice berg that is perceivable via introspection is misleading insofar as it seems to be a content of my consciousness that is somehow external to me. That's an illusion. A quale is not an object that is independent of a mind that is perceiving the quale. But it's one thing so say what a quale is not, and quite another to say, in positive terms, exactly what a quale is.
My proposal is this: A quale is a physical process and, like any physical process, it is possible to study the process from many different perspectives. But a quale is profoundly unlike most physical processes. A quale is a constituent element of an intrinsically self-organizing, goal-seeking, world-perceiving, self-referential process (aka, a brain). I've bolded the "self-referential" because, in this context, this is the key aspect of interest. If X is a self-referential process, then, logically, X is the only process that can self-reference X. If the self-referential aspect of X provides any sort of perspective on X, then X is the only process that can achieve this perspective. If this self-referential aspect is responsible for the qualitative "raw feels" of experience, then it follows that X is the only process that can perceive the raw feels associated with being X. NO mystical selves or immortal souls need apply for a job here. They are not necessary. The weird subjective nature of qualia follows via simple logic from the premises.
Now, obviously there is a gigantic IF in the midst of this explanation. When I study your brain, why should I believe that there is any sort of perspective arising from the self-referential aspect of your brain process? To posit such a perspective is to posit the existence of a perspective that I cannot possibly prove. (Because, in case you've already forgotten, X is the only process capable of perceiving the self-referential perspective - assuming there is such a perspective.)
If X insists that there is (or isn't) a self-referential perspective, then I cannot prove that there is (or isn't) such a perspective for X. The best I can do is prove - to my own satisfaction - whether or not there seems to be such a perspective for me (given that I am a self-referential process). This is what I've been calling "the logic of subjectivity."
But notice I said "seems to be". Personally, I think that if there seems to be a self-referential perspective, then I have every logical right to believe that there is such a perspective, but some of you have complained that the waters of illusion could run so deep that there might, in fact, not even be a perspective where there seems to be a perspective. Frankly, I find that idea to be pointlessly counterintuitive and absurd, but I can't prove that you are wrong, so go ahead and knock yourself out (sorta literally, it seems). I still feel totally justified in positing the existence of a self-referential perspective, and using this hypothesis to explain the subjective nature of qualia.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 12-17-2014 at 10:56 AM..
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