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This is another way of saying that if X has a personal subjective experience, that experience is of no real use to anyone but X. And possibly not even to X, because personal subjective experiences can be deceptive and misleading.
The fact that subjective experience can be misleading does not imply that it is misleading. For the most part, evolution has provided us with amazingly reliable subjective experiences. The vast, vast, vast majority of the time, you depend on the nature qualitative of your subjective experiences without hesitation, and without dangerous consequences. Yes, illusions and delusions can happen, but given the overall overwhelming dependability of our qualitative experiences, I think we should give our most powerful and persistent intuitions some benefit of the doubt until some strong evidence forces us to conclude that our intuitions are wrong. (In other words: Maintain a healthy "innocent until proven guilty" sort of skepticism, not "guilty until proven innocent".
As I see it, the main thing that has trigged most of our skepticism about the existence of qualia is our inability to reductively explain their nature in terms of our current concepts of "physical" reality. Given this hard problem, we can question our current concepts about the nature of the physical world, or we can question the existence of what feels like our immediate subjective/qualitative experiences.
Historically, our concepts of the physical nature of the world have changed considerably over time. A couple of hundred years ago, people would think we were crazy if we tried to explain physical events in terms of relatively and quantum mechanics. I think that our intuitions about the reality of our qualitative experiences are probably powerful and persistent for good reasons. Why shouldn't I think of this, here, now feeling of the blueness of the sky as a genuine and important aspect of the real world? Why shouldn't I conclude - until better evidence comes along - that physical reality has some fundamentally qualitative potentials?
I would love to see you and KC (and maybe Arequipa?) get into a debate over this. KC insists that there is nothing about my qualitative experiences that cannot, in principle, be observed by neurologists. He will say, for example, that a neurologist can, in principle, know everything about what the experience of seeing blue is like for me. I would love to see someone else try to defend the concept of subjectivity or the epistemological limits of third-person knowledge. I've run out of ideas about how to explain it. To me it seems like such an astoundingly obvious, self-evident logical concept that I have trouble imagining how to go about the task of proving it to someone who denies it.
You have been doing an admirable job of trying, Gaylen. I sdmit to being somewhat envious of your tenacity and creativity in presenting what is equally obvious to me. I suspect the difference is that those we confront here are more used to thinking about philosophy as something you do after getting drunk in a bar. Thinking deeply and rigorously about things philosophical is not a typical mindset.
An infinite regress occurs when two or more statements depend on each other. In this case, "objective verification" depends on real people- embodied physical systems - analyzing and interpreting data. But what does the experience of an embodied physical system depend on? Notice I'm talking about the experience itself - not an interpretation of experience nor a judgment about an experience, nor an analysis of what constitutes the experience
You're doing exactly that right here:
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Do I need to analyze and interpret abstract data in order to come to the conclusion that I am seeing blue?
You've moved past a raw feeling and are now comparing it to others you've had, applying language to it, and correlating it with what others use the same word to describe. You need some sort of outside reference point to know that the feeling you're having is what it is like when you experience blue.
So again, how is drawing the line at subjective experience any less arbitrary than any other point in the chain?
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In any give moment of experience, the "this, here, now" qualitative feel of the experience is just a brute fact of reality - the feeling that I'm having this experience right now just is what it is at the moment.
That's great, but what does that have to do with what you were describing before? By classifying it and applying a shared language to it you're going way beyond just having a raw feeling of an experience. You're using an external shared reality to try and identify it, communicate it and so on. So where does the infinite regress actually stop? You say it is at raw feelings, but if so, why the need to preach about them to others rather than just have them and be done with it?
The fact that subjective experience can be misleading does not imply that it is misleading.
We do know for a fact it is misleading about the nature of brain function. There's lots of research that demonstrates that fact very clearly.
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As I see it, the main thing that has trigged most of our skepticism about the existence of qualia is our inability to reductively explain their nature in terms of our current concepts of "physical" reality.
No. the bigger problem is that the way they are defined it is impossible to communicate about them using shared language since they are defined to be internal and unsharable. And then people who promote that definition talk on and on and on about them. There's a disconnect there that's a bit perplexing. Seems like they are fuzzy enough to do whatever is needed for any particular argument, regardless of how different that is from what they were needed for last time.
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I think that our intuitions about the reality of our qualitative experiences are probably powerful and persistent for good reasons.
Could be. The problem is that we have lots of evidence that "being correct descriptions of how brains actually work" isn't one of those reasons.
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Why shouldn't I conclude - until better evidence comes along - that physical reality has some fundamentally qualitative potentials?
Mainly because none of us have any idea what that actually means. Assuming it means anything at all.
Tell me, monumentus . . . do you EVER intend to do anything but talk about ME and what I am or am not doing??? You DO know what that is called in debate, right? I suspect not . . . because that seems to be your ONLY objective.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
You have been doing an admirable job of trying, Gaylen. I sdmit to being somewhat envious of your tenacity and creativity in presenting what is equally obvious to me. I suspect the difference is that those we confront here are more used to thinking about philosophy as something you do after getting drunk in a bar. Thinking deeply and rigorously about things philosophical is not a typical mindset.
You guys need to have a side discussion and figure out if you think it is a problem to focus on the character and intelligence of the people in a discussion as opposed to their ideas. Get back to us when you've come to a conclusion.
The fact that subjective experience can be misleading does not imply that it is misleading. For the most part, evolution has provided us with amazingly reliable subjective experiences.
Yes, but my point was that we don't trust those as reliable if we are the only one experiencing them.
Now most people agree that on a sunny, cloudless day not too close to sunrise or sunset, the sky is normally blue. When we point that out to each other it's evident we're all talking about substantially the same thing, even though no one can quantify what it's LIKE to perceive blue exactly. We assume it's the same subjective experience for all comers and that's an okay assumption for everyday purposes, in fact, for all purposes perhaps except for philosophical ones.
But the more abstract we get, the hairier it gets. When we talk about what it's like experiencing happiness, anxiety, or the Divine, we start to get conflicting reports. Some of it can be explained as natural variance (anxiety for instance might produce a number of responses: hand-wringing timidity, insomnia, some form of over compensation or denial -- at various intensity levels). But some things are rather ineffable and indescribable in anything like a concrete fashion and in the case, say, of gods, have no corresponding touchstone in actual experience and are not amenable to relatively objective measurements or observations. It is these things that I distrust making sweeping statements about, because there is not much agreement about them and thus to my mind especially likely to be illusory or deceptive. And it is these things that appear to me to be swaying the discourse about the nature of being generally and qualia specifically.
What I think is going on is that the quality of ideas about actual objects in the world are pretty clear, ideas a little less, ideas ABOUT ideas still less, and so on. The further we get from concrete things, the more an idea or experience is strictly in between our ears, the dicier it gets and it's exactly for this reason that I doubt there is a universal suchness to any notion unless it is very simple and fairly innocuous and, hence, our persistent ideas and faulty perceptions don't intrude on the matter much.
Last night I watched a movie in which a man was depicted with severe claustrophobia, because as a child he had been trapped for a long time in an enclosed space and at great peril to his life. Here is an example of where his experience of "what it is like to be in a closet" is going to differ from most people's, because for him, an irrational association has been superimposed on the mundane concept of "closet". To me it is an example of how qualia is an idea of questionable utility -- when some people are moved to question the quality of an experience as very different from the norm. I don't think there's a Qualia of Closetedness that would tell us objectively what the experience of being closeted is. It can be cozy or stifling, or indifferent, depending upon the person.
Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding the concept ... that's possible. But these are the concerns I have.
An infinite regress occurs when two or more statements depend on each other. In this case, "objective verification" depends on real people - embodied physical systems - analyzing and interpreting data. But what does the experience of an embodied physical system depend on? Notice I'm talking about the experience itself - not an interpretation of experience nor a judgment about an experience, nor an analysis of what constitutes the experience - but, rather, I'm just referring to the experience itself i.e., the indexical "this, here, now" qualitative feel of the person who is studying the data. Do I need to analyze and interpret abstract data in order to come to the conclusion that I am seeing blue? Do I need a brain scan to tell me that I believe that I am seeing a blue wall? I think not.
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Originally Posted by KCfromNC
You've moved past a raw feeling and are now comparing it to others you've had, applying language to it, and correlating it with what others use the same word to describe. You need some sort of outside reference point to know that the feeling you're having is what it is like when you experience blue.
So again, how is drawing the line at subjective experience any less arbitrary than any other point in the chain?
My question was rhetorical. The literal answer is a simple "no" - I do not need to analyze and interpret abstract data in order to come to come to the conclusion that I am seeing blue. In fact, I don't need to come to any conclusion at all - I just simply have a qualitative experience that - if I reflect upon it and have to come up with words to describe it, I would use words like "seeing blue." But the point of my response to you was that the qualitative experiences of embodied physical systems don't depend on third-person verification, and thus the infinite regress does not occur. Yes, if I want to discuss my qualitative experiences with other people, then I will need to draw on my understanding of public language, and I could mistakenly choose the wrong word. But, nevertheless, the buck still stops with qualitative embodied experience. The raw feels ground all interpretations of publicly available data. It's not an arbitrary line.
But let's not forget how we ended up going off on this tangent. I quoted Heisenberg saying: "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." My point was that we cannot ignore the role of the observer in any claims we make about the physical world because all of our knowledge of the physical world is gained through a process in which the observer's methods of observation impact the nature of what is observed. A brain is a physical process that is capable of self-reference. It is not obvious, at the moment, why the type of self-referential processes we find in a brain should be correlated with qualitative experiences ("raw feels"), but we know with certainty that we do have qualitative experiences, so it seems reasonable to study the brain to see what types of processes are correlated with our various qualitative experiences. I'm proposing that self-reference is one of the keys to explaining the correlations. But let's not forget the impact of our "method of questioning." Self-observation is (or, at least plausibly could be) a different "method of questioning" than observation of another person's brain. In this light, it seems reasonable that what I observer when I observe my own brain "from the inside" might be fundamentally different than what someone else observes when they observe my brain processes "from the outside." The method could make a great deal of different, and if it does make a difference, then it follows that what I observe self-referentially will be a subjective experience. I am the only one who can experience my self via the observational method of self-reference.
if we knew the state of every particle in the brain and how they store and transfer information we would know what that brain thinks. If we knew how every particle effects "emotion" then we could describe the emotions of that brain.
But, just like your description of quail, the description of what Mary was feeling is NOT the feeling itself thus incomplete. Then if we put "you" in Mary's body to experience what she experienced and returned you to your body you would get a better sense of what she "felt". But it could not be "exactly" what she felt because there was "you" in Mary and not "pure Mary". (hey Pure Mary ... damn Catholics intrude on every convo).
we all agree to that gray. It doesn't matter what words we put in or even if there is a formula that can describe it. The only way to "know, 100%" what Mary feels or knows is to be Mary. But they can't even build two race cars the same yet.
My question was rhetorical. The literal answer is a simple "no" - I do not need to analyze and interpret abstract data in order to come to come to the conclusion that I am seeing blue.
Sure you do. You have to compare the feeling against past experiences. And then you have to compare that set of experiences against multiple descriptions of the same experience from others to see if it matches the shared meaning ascribed to the word "blue".
Without all that, you just have a raw something of what something is something to something something.
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In fact, I don't need to come to any conclusion at all - I just simply have a qualitative experience that - if I reflect upon it and have to come up with words to describe it, I would use words like "seeing blue."
By using public language to classify the experience, you're already submitting it to concepts learned via external objective reality.
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But the point of my response to you was that the qualitative experiences of embodied physical systems don't depend on third-person verification, and thus the infinite regress does not occur.
As long as all you want to do is feel, true. As soon as you use any sort of language-based thought to analyze them, you're moving into things that come from outside raw feels.
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Yes, if I want to discuss my qualitative experiences with other people, then I will need to draw on my understanding of public language, and I could mistakenly choose the wrong word. But, nevertheless, the buck still stops with qualitative embodied experience. The raw feels ground all interpretations of publicly available data. It's not an arbitrary line.
Maybe for some people - after all, there are posters on this thread with intricate religious beliefs about the nature of mind based solely on a vision they had. But that's simply one unjustifiably metaphysical approach
among many.
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But let's not forget how we ended up going off on this tangent. I quoted Heisenberg saying: "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." My point was that we cannot ignore the role of the observer in any claims we make about the physical world because all of our knowledge of the physical world is gained through a process in which the observer's methods of observation impact the nature of what is observed.
Yes, this is why ideas backed by multiple lines of independent objective evidence are way more trustworthy. What this has to do with making science more subjective is a mystery.
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A brain is a physical process that is capable of self-reference. It is not obvious, at the moment, why the type of self-referential processes we find in a brain should be correlated with qualitative experiences
And with all this uncertainty there's no need to pretend we know for a fact which approaches can and can't work.
Tell me, monumentus . . . do you EVER intend to do anything but
If you want to know anything else about what I "do" then simply use the search function to look at my other posts.
Making up stuff about me is both dishonest and off topic. Can we stick to the topic please? I have asked you DIRECT on topic questions. Can you answer them or not?
I repeat my on topic points -
What is wrong with a self referential - ITERATIVE - system? Your whole issue seems to be that a system that references itself will be modified by that reference. So what? Why can it not be a reference - iteration - reference - iteration system that constantly self references in this fashion?
Why would a system created non-biologically - to mimic a biological one - be any less "alive" or "intelligent" or capable of experiencing the sensation of "I" as much as you or I do?
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
I suspect the difference is that those we confront here are more used to thinking about philosophy as something you do after getting drunk in a bar. Thinking deeply and rigorously about things philosophical is not a typical mindset.
Does throwing out derision at people because they simply do not agreee with you, get us anywhere?
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