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I have to agree Kc. But I can't get past the notion that if I inject a chemical into a body I can make that body "love". This "love" would express itself as compassion. Buddha put this quali thing in terms of "stream of desires". My guess is that these streams have a physical component just like "virtual particles" might. Virtual particles are based on our lack of understanding about the universe. But that does not mean that our understanding about conservation laws are as incomplete as our understanding about the universe.
we can inject pain, warmth, love, and hate into people. How many valid conclusion can be based off of this observation?
[Disclaimer: I'm no behavioral expert, but am an avid reader of psychology, neuroscience, zoology and other fields that study behavior. That said, I'll hazard to answer your highlighted question.]
Not only can various substances induce a variety of perceptions, but in many cases environmental stimulation can be manipulated persons to feel things (again, degree of susceptibility is individually variable). Think of a TV commercial for a home security system showing a prowler attempting to break into a home: such imagery is specifically intended to evoke feeling of apprehension and fear to the viewer will be more inclined to buy the security system.
The fact perceptions can be so easily evoked by both environmental stimulation and ingested substances is overwhelming evidence the perception is entirely physiological. In many cases we can't pinpoint the exact physiological processes associated with specific perceptions, but this doesn't mean they don't have a physiological basis; only that their exact nature is presently unknown. Many will argue they must emanate from the 'soul', or some other non-physical component of ourselves, but there's absolutely no evidence for this assertion. If science contends something is unknown, that's all it means - we simply don't know.
IOW everyone sees the world from their own perspective.
Seems rather a tautology.
It seems that way to me as well, and I believe that KC might agree. One bone of contention between KC and I can probably be stated rather simply as this: Is there any information in each person's unique perspective that cannot be reduced to (or fully explained in terms of) third-person-accessible data? As I understand him, KC has argued that Mary (the super-neurologist who understands everything that can be objectively understood about seeing red) learns nothing knew when she experiences red for the first time with her own eyes. In other words, her personal experience of red from her own unique perspective contains no information that she didn't already learn by studying other people's brains. I, on the other hand, say that Mary does learn something new. Specifically, she comes to appreciate the feeling of seeing red.
I don't think that a full understanding of the feeling can be conveyed from one person to another via public language, or via any abstract mathematical model. As I see it, the only way anyone can understand the qualitative feel of red is to experience it personally vial their own unique perspective. Other people can study the neural correlates that constitute the feeling of red, and in doing this they can understand a great deal about the experience that cannot be known just form the first-person perspective, but the flip-side is that the personal perspective yields some knowledge that the public perspectives cannot.
No, an infinite regress is turtles all the way down.
I think that a detailed discussion about the structure of infinite regress and the mathematics of recursion would take us deep into a forest that would be way off topic, but there was a relevant and interesting point to be made, so I'd like to reiterate my earlier claim:
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Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
And then, again, each of these instances of "objective verification" are, in turn, grounded on someone's personal experience of gathering and analyzing data. If you insist that this, in turn, is grounded on even more objective data, then we have an infinite regress. The only place that the buck can possibly stop is with the personal qualitative experiences of the people who are asking the questions and looking at the evidence. ... Data is only "data" insofar as it is perceived as such and understood by some conscious thinker from a particular perspective. All acts of verification are acts of particular people ... they need to be instantiated by conscious beings who qualitatively embody the activities.
I don't see what sense can be made of data that is not grounded in some subjective experience of perceiving, analyzing, calculating, etc. I underlined 'data' because I will grant that you can talk of objective facts that exist independently of subjective interpretation. But data are facts that have been gathered and/or interpreted for some purpose - e.g., to test a hypothesis or to search for patterns, etc. I don't think that the idea of "objective data" makes sense unless it is, in effect, a shorthand term for "data that is inter-subjectively agreed upon." You just can't plausibly eliminate subjectivity from your data. The best you can do is increase your feeling of confidence by gathering lots and lots of subjects who say they see the same data and agree with your interpretation of the data. This is what science does, and we learn a lot of cool stuff by this inter-subjective data-confirmation method. But my claim is that there are limits to the types of knowledge that can be rendered by objective methods. Subjective knowledge fills the gap.
Subjective experience without a prior process of data collection and interpretation is just basic sentience or "raw feels" - sorta like you might expect with infants, animals, or perhaps people engaged in certain types of meditation (although the notion of linguistically competent adults having "pure experience" of this sort is admittedly controversial). This level of subjective/qualitative experience is the cornerstone of the "hard problem." The "raw feels" are what we seemingly can imagine being missing in zombies.
Data without subjective experience is...what? It's a meaningless concept. So, it seems to me that efforts to explain subjective experience in terms of purely objective facts is destined to fail. Objective facts don't explain anything in themselves. Subjects are required for the process of referring to the objective facts. The supposedly objective facts are knowable only in light of a subject's method of questioning, and the method of questioning actualizes the facts probabilistically out of an infinite sea of potentials.
It seems that way to me as well, and I believe that KC might agree. One bone of contention between KC and I can probably be stated rather simply as this: Is there any information in each person's unique perspective that cannot be reduced to (or fully explained in terms of) third-person-accessible data? As I understand him, KC has argued that Mary (the super-neurologist who understands everything that can be objectively understood about seeing red) learns nothing knew when she experiences red for the first time with her own eyes.
Really? I have? I think I mentioned that it is "logically" "possible" that she might be able to learn to implant memories of having an experience without actually having that experience, sidestepping the whole imagined problem. After all, if we're just making up impossible scenarios like an all knowing scientists who can't figure out how to sneak a glance at a picture of an apple we might as well go all out with our imagination.
But no, I have no idea what will happen. I have some guesses based on some things I've read about neurology - and strangely they look way different than the options presented by people pimping this argument. Realistically, though, no one knows the answer since experiments like this are immoral so we're lacking any empirical data on the subject. Not to mention how hard it is to find omniscient scientists who will spend their life living in a black and white room.
One may guess all they like based on whatever preconceptions they have but all that tells you is what you already believe. That's why these sorts of thought experiments are useless. They let one imagine all sorts of things and are never related back to actual data on brain function, so they're ignoring the one thing which might help us figure out what is going on. It might be why the guy who came up with is abandoned it long ago.
I'm sure they are a big hit entertaining with at parties, though.
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Specifically, she comes to appreciate the feeling of seeing red.
The feeling of seeing red can be evoked before she is exposed to a red object. I posted a link to black and white image which will do the trick, and given that Mary is omniscient she knows about it too. Considering the premise of the argument was that she's stuck in a black and white room and never experiences red until she's exposed to a red object, the whole hypothetical runs counter to how our brains actually work. So the thought experiment is wonderful fun to play around with but has little to no bearing on reality.
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As I see it, the only way anyone can understand the qualitative feel of red is to experience it personally vial their own unique perspective.
What the heck is understanding a feeling? What's to understand?
Sounds like the other poster said - you're using a lot of words to say people feel what they feel when they have a feeling.
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Other people can study the neural correlates that constitute the feeling of red, and in doing this they can understand a great deal about the experience that cannot be known just form the first-person perspective, but the flip-side is that the personal perspective yields some knowledge that the public perspectives cannot.
Or put it more simply, learning about how the brain works doesn't automatically evoke a feeling. Kind of like learning how planes work doesn't make one fly. I'm not sure who would expect that to be that case, but it seems pretty obvious that no one should. This kind of thinking is hardly going to revolutionize the epistemological basis of scientific investigation.
I don't see what sense can be made of data that is not grounded in some subjective experience of perceiving, analyzing, calculating, etc.
Your car's engine managements system might have a different opinion. Assuming it had a subjective point of view about the data it is analyzing, calculating and so on, which it doesn't. Which is kind of the point of me bringing it up, since it makes sense of data without worrying about a subjective experience of it.
Or is this just another tautology - only things which have subjective experiences have subjective experiences of the things they're subjectively experiencing?
gayland. subjective experience is grounded in "data" not the other way around. maybe we need to explore the possibility that different people ground themselves in different places. emotional people ground in emotion. "logical people", not use as better than "emotional" here, ground in data.
It is ok to attack unknowns from all angles, in fact I make it a point to do so, but that approach leads to some angles being less valid thus we know the more the valid solutions. notice "more valid solutionS" meaning more than one.
[Disclaimer: I'm no behavioral expert, but am an avid reader of psychology, neuroscience, zoology and other fields that study behavior. That said, I'll hazard to answer your highlighted question.]
Not only can various substances induce a variety of perceptions, but in many cases environmental stimulation can be manipulated persons to feel things (again, degree of susceptibility is individually variable). Think of a TV commercial for a home security system showing a prowler attempting to break into a home: such imagery is specifically intended to evoke feeling of apprehension and fear to the viewer will be more inclined to buy the security system.
The fact perceptions can be so easily evoked by both environmental stimulation and ingested substances is overwhelming evidence the perception is entirely physiological. In many cases we can't pinpoint the exact physiological processes associated with specific perceptions, but this doesn't mean they don't have a physiological basis; only that their exact nature is presently unknown. Many will argue they must emanate from the 'soul', or some other non-physical component of ourselves, but there's absolutely no evidence for this assertion. If science contends something is unknown, that's all it means - we simply don't know.
yes, When I say "inject" that can mean changing the surrounding system in some way. We can inject through vision, sound, skin, and nose. And many other ways, well not many, but you know what i mean.
I think I mentioned that it is "logically" "possible" that she might be able to learn to implant memories of having an experience without actually having that experience.
Yes, and this logical possibility highlights precisely the same problem as Jackson's original thought experiment (and other thought experiments, like zombies, inverted qualia, etc.). None of these thought experiments is meant to prove anything about empirically-testable reality, which is to say, the point of these thought experiments is not to map the boundaries of "natural possibility" - they only address logical possibility. Arguments over logical possibility are meant to identify conceptual inconsistencies. If your concepts are logically inconsistent, then any empirical data that depend on these concepts becomes meaningless (or at least highly unreliable). Math is a good example. If our mathematical theorems were found to be logically inconsistent, then an infinite number of false statements could be mathematically proven to be true - which, of course, would be a disaster for math and science. Luckily, no one has ever shown the framework of math to be inconsistent (Gödel showed that math can't be both consistent and complete, but this basically just means that math is incomplete).
Getting back to Mary: The philosophical debate concerns the logical consistency of the concept of "qualia" and the logical consistency of the basic premises of the various theories of mind (e.g., phyiscalism, substance dualism, property dualism, panpsychism, etc.). If a theory can be shown to be logically inconsistent, then it's game-over for that theory. Empirical evidence is utterly irrelevant if it is being used to support a logically inconsistence theory. Thought experiments like Mary, zombies, inverted qualia, etc., are meant to show that reductive materialism is logically inconsistent. If Mary can, in principle, learn something via personal experience that she could not learn by studying other people's brains, then Mary's subjective knowledge cannot be fully reduced to objective facts. Your suggestion for implanting memories doesn't affect the underlying logical issue. Memories, dreams, and illusions are all forms of subjective/qualitative experience. A memory of red, or an illusion of red, may be different, in some ways, than an immediate perception of red in the environment, but it is not different in the key way that matters; it is still a subjective/qualitative experience. (For essentially the same reason that the "illusion" of pain on your back when touched by an ice cube still seems qualitatively painful to you at the moment.)
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What the heck is understanding a feeling? What's to understand?
I have the opposite question for you: How could the experience of a feeling not count as a sort of understanding? To understand X is to become aware of the nature of X, or comprehend the meaning of X. Try explaining the qualitative feeling of blue to a blind person. If your words fail to convey the feeling of blue, doesn't it makes sense to say that the blind person fails to understand what you mean by 'blue'?
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Sounds like the other poster said - you're using a lot of words to say people feel what they feel when they have a feeling.
Yes, but the debate is whether these feelings are fully explainable in terms of public language and mathematical models. I say no.
Language involves reference. You can use language and models to refer to activity in my brain. I can look at the brain scans and other data and understand my brain activity in the same way that you understand my brain activity. This is what public language is all about. We can share meanings in this way. But I say that, in addition to this understanding, I have another level of understanding of my brain activity. I have the subjective/qualitative feeling of my own feelings. I don't come to understand these subjective aspects by studying the data about my brain. I simply feel the feelings.
Try explaining the qualitative feeling of blue to a blind person. If your words fail to convey the feeling of blue, doesn't it makes sense to say that the blind person fails to understand what you mean by 'blue'?]
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.
There is an old joke about Irish mothers, when their child comes in from eating a particularly messes Sugary Treat, will call out "Oh my god, look at your face!". The joke being that any child who does attempt to look at their own face will A) Look very stupid in the attempt and B) fail entirely. Your face is the reference point for viewing the world and the reference point can not look at itself, at least without tools like mirrors.
As said above Language involves reference. The philosophical desire to place more import on "qualia" uses this fact to lay philosophical traps. And one of those traps / tricks is the "Try and explain blue to a blind person" canard.
Actually the "blind" part of the trap is superfluous because sighted people can not even explain the experience of blue to each other. But the reason "blind" is included is clear: It is to hide the trap better than would be hidden if you left it out because in dropping the "blind" part you get one step closer to the realization of what the actual issue is, and it has little to do with qualia and almost everything to do with how language works.
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.
Our language, and the biological evolution of our language, simply has not formed to achieve this because, due to the mass unity and universality of the human condition and experience, and the relative minority of conditions like blindness..... neither language nor the human ability for language HAD to evolve to achieve this level of complexity.
So I would be wary of presenting these limitations in language as some philosophical argument for the importance of qualia on the topic of consciousness in AI machines, as much as I would be wary of the philosophical grounding of the arguments of anyone who is attempting to play that canard on you.
And besides, as another user has pointed out several times and merely been ignored or at least dodged..... there certainly is no arguments being offered here to suggest that an Artificial Intelligence designed for such self reference of experience and language would be any less capable of experiencing this Qualia.... this "I"..... than the biological machine that is us. They would still be both machines, they would still be performing all the same functions, the sole and only difference is one machine is built from biological components and the other is not.
And given that SOLE difference between them, I have seen NO argument on this thread in 635+ posts adumbrating some conditions or reasons why an AI machine would be precluded ANY of the capabilities or attributes that the biological counterpart would have.
What words have been thrown out to try and linguistically preclude these things where actual arguments have failed..... words like "life" and "alive", have themselves the EXACT same issue as that which they are thrown out to address.... that they too again.... given this SOLE difference.... would appear to have no arguments as to why they are precluded from one system and not the other either. And this approach of linguistic "turtles all the way down" substitution for an actual argument is as unimpressive as it is uninformative and useless.
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