Consciousness is a part of reality wich can only be explained with wordsalad

MaartenVergu

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MaartenVergu
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The problem with consciousness is that it is wordsalad. You cannot talk about it without using wordsalad. Wich means: conscious (or uncouscious) phenomena are non-detectable aspects of a detectable electrochemical process.

What does 'to experience colors' mean? To reduce your explanation to the electro-chemical process, will not reveal us anything about the nature of 'to experience colors'.

A philosophical zombie will not be able to understand 'to experience' when it has not such qualia. The robot without consciousness, but with perfect mathskills and perfect scientific instruments will ony accept the explanation: electrochemical process x in the brain. It will call your 'feelings' or 'experience' or 'colors' wordsalad. It will call your feeling of pain wordsalad.

A dream for example. Try to discover a dream while you are investigating a brain. That's impossible. You will not be able to distract a dream logically by measuring a chemical process in the brain. You need to be that chemical process (we, human beings) to know that dreaming is an invisible part of a chemical reality. Images in our head are part of a electrochemical reality too. We know this wordsalad (images in the head or 'dreams') exists because we are that electrochemistry wich experience the existence of it. So, to be is to know. Not: to investigate is to know. Only to know when you are this system.

We can conclude that wordsalad is the only tool we have to communicate about consciousness (wich is wordsalad to the robot without the experience of consciousness but with superb scientific tools and mathematical computing capacity).

It's an objective boundery about what can be described in sc!entific terms or what can be discovered by only our most sophisticated robots, when they are philosophical zombies.

__________________
 
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Maartenn100 said:
.... You will not be able to distract a dream logically by measuring a chemical process in the brain.
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I had neglected to secure my guitars and they had been stolen. Or maybe they were still in my car, in the dark.

Through the rubble, I could see my car had been plowed over, but there were still guitars in it.

Well, it wasn't really my car, and they weren't my guitars. But I could have them anyway, if I could get away with them. I could have them, and I would be whole again.

My youth.

My passion.

One was some kind of Telecaster copy, blond, and flat-chested. It was on top of the other two.

I hopped up and down on one foot, and began shouting something about affirming the consequent.

But my dream knew better. It couldn't be distracted so easily.

I woke up, longing for my fugitive, elusive blond guitar.
 
Maartenn100 said:
The problem with consciousness is that it is wordsalad. You cannot talk about it without using wordsalad. Wich means: conscious (or uncouscious) phenomena are non-detectable aspects of a detectable electrochemical process.

What does 'to experience colors' mean? To reduce your explanation to the electro-chemical process, will not reveal us anything about the nature of 'to experience colors'.

A philosophical zombie will not be able to understand 'to experience' when it has not such qualia. The robot without consciousness, but with perfect mathskills and perfect scientific instruments will ony accept the explanation: electrochemical process x in the brain. It will call your 'feelings' or 'experience' or 'colors' wordsalad. It will call your feeling of pain wordsalad.

A dream for example. Try to discover a dream while you are investigating a brain. That's impossible. You will not be able to distract a dream logically by measuring a chemical process in the brain. You need to be that chemical process (we, human beings) to know that dreaming is an invisible part of a chemical reality. Images in our head are part of a electrochemical reality too. We know this wordsalad (images in the head or 'dreams') exists because we are that electrochemistry wich experience the existence of it. So, to be is to know. Not: to investigate is to know. Only to know when you are this system.

We can conclude that wordsalad is the only tool we have to communicate about consciousness (wich is wordsalad to the robot without the experience of consciousness but with superb scientific tools and mathematical computing capacity).

It's an objective boundery about what can be described in sc!entific terms or what can be discovered by only our most sophisticated robots, when they are philosophical zombies.

__________________
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dissect
 
calebprime said:
I had neglected to secure my guitars and they had been stolen. Or maybe they were still in my car, in the dark.

Through the rubble, I could see my car had been plowed over, but there were still guitars in it.

Well, it wasn't really my car, and they weren't my guitars. But I could have them anyway, if I could get away with them. I could have them, and I would be whole again.

My youth.

My passion.

One was some kind of Telecaster copy, blond, and flat-chested. It was on top of the other two.

I hopped up and down on one foot, and began shouting something about affirming the consequent.

But my dream knew better. It couldn't be distracted so easily.

I woke up, longing for my fugitive, elusive blond guitar.
Click to expand...

:D:D:D:D
 
Read Self Comes to Mind, by Antonio Damasio. It offers a possible explanation for how consciousness evolved and arose in humans. And, it is certainly NOT word salad.

It IS possible to talk about these things in empirically reliable terms. It might be hard. But, science is on the task! (Not Deepak Chopra, though.)
 
One of the worst things you can do to yourself, intellectually, is to proclaim that something you don't know is impossible.
 
Wowbagger said:
Read Self Comes to Mind, by Antonio Damasio. It offers a possible explanation for how consciousness evolved and arose in humans. And, it is certainly NOT word salad.

It IS possible to talk about these things in empirically reliable terms. It might be hard. But, science is on the task! (Not Deepak Chopra, though.)
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I have not read Damasio's book, but his integrated information approach is very promising. It is at least the kind of theory we need.

I also think this is another great contender:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11301521

You won't be able to read anything beside the abstract unless you have a subscription however. If you are really interested I am more than happy to email a copy.
 
It is a logic frontier. Read more about the other mind problem.

Words like experience, mind, feeling, etc. are wordsalad to a real scientist. When the scientist wants to be consistent with his own tools of knowledge, the mind is a wordsalad world to him.

Imagine a robot, without a mind, but with superb math computing skills and superb scientific measuring tools. It will never find feelings in a brain, while investigating it.
So the scientific tool is limited. Feelings are wordsalad to this robot. Chemical processes, on the other hand, can be mapped mathematically and measured with tools.
No feelings in the brain or nerv system.

The mind (what is that?) is a big error to the robot scientist. The archetype of the beta-scientist.

happyness, joy, sadness, enhanced consciousness, all wordsalad for a consequent scientist.
 
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Maartenn100 said:
It is a logic frontier. Read more about the other mind problem.

Words like experience, mind, feeling, etc. are wordsalad to a real scientist. When the scientist wants to be consistent with his own tools of knowledge, the mind is a wordsalad world to him.

Imagine a robot, without a mind, but with superb math computing skills and superb scientific measuring tools. It will never find feelings in a brain, while investigating it.
So the scientific tool is limited. Feelings are wordsalad to this robot. Chemical processes, on the other hand, can be mapped mathematically and measured with tools.
No feelings in the brain or nerv system.

The mind (what is that?) is a big error to the robot scientist. The archetype of the beta-scientist.

happyness, joy, sadness, enhanced consciousness, all wordsalad for a consequent scientist.
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So psychology is not a real science?
 
At the risk of prolonging the agony, I'll suggest another book.... The Evolution Of Consciousness by Robert Ornstein.

I know that philosophers tie themselves in knots trying to define words like "qualia". However, the answers to how the mind works are not to be found in philosophy, but neuroscience.
 
Of course, you need to accept philosophy of mind.

Pixymisa claims that there is a scientific way to discover the fact that other people than you have other minds. Nope, you re wrong, Pixyisa. There is a boundery of what we can know. Learn more about epistemology: what can we know? We can only guess that other people, animals ans maybe sophisticated robots have other minds.
 
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Bikewer said:
At the risk of prolonging the agony, I'll suggest another book.... The Evolution Of Consciousness by Robert Ornstein.

I know that philosophers tie themselves in knots trying to define words like "qualia". However, the answers to how the mind works are not to be found in philosophy, but neuroscience.
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I completely disagree. Cognitive science is the relevant field concerned with how the mind works. Cognitive science is interdisciplinary, so neuroscience does feature in cognitive science. However, it would be a mistake to think that neuroscience alone is adequate, because if you study neuroscience you are really only focusing on the stuff of the brain, and not learning what the brain does - it processes information, it computes. The reason this distinction is important is because there doesn't seem to be any reason why our brains could be the only minded structures. It has been suggested that non-carbon-based structures such as those made of silicon can be arranged in such a way that would allow for information processing. Despite what Searle suggests, it seems unlikely that you need the right kind of 'stuff' to make minds. Think of it this way, you can use different 'stuff' to play a game of chess - it doesn't matter what the pieces are made of but what the pieces do, the function they have that's relevant.
 
I know a great deal about the philosophy of the mind. It's mostly garbage, and has been steamrolled by the science of the mind.

Asking people whether they have minds is a completely valid, objective, scientific test for whether they have minds. And, as it happens, they do.
 
bikewer said:
I know that philosophers tie themselves in knots trying to define words like "qualia". ...
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You can learn more about qualia here.
"Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the perceived redness of an evening sky, or what a marijuana high feels like." (wikipedia)
To bikewer, it's wordsalad. And the pure materialist view cannot handle such things like qualia, indeed.
 
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You proof my point. It's wordsalad for you. However, the taste of wine, the pain of a headache or what marihuana feels like exists. But the materialist can't handle it with his limited tools.
 
Maartenn100 said:
You proof my point. It's wordsalad for you.
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No, it's wordsalad for you. You're the one talking about invisible pink unicorns.

However, the taste of wine, the pain of a headache or what marihuana feels like exists.
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Certainly those things exist. It's qualia that don't exist.

But the materialist can't handle it with his limited tools.
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We have no problem with those things. It's only you that has a problem.
 
I'll admit that what I'm saying is total gibberish, but in a sly winkingmanner in a vain attempt to sound "Deep."
 
Pixymisa says: qualia don't exist, but the taste of wine, the pain of a headache or what marihuana feels like exists. Wikipedia tells us that these existing things are called qualia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

Go and change Wikipedia; The public is misinformed.
 
Maartenn100 said:
Pixymisa says: qualia don't exist, but the taste of wine, the pain of a headache or what marihuana feels like exists. Wikipedia tells us that these existing things are called qualia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
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Wikipedia tells us that:

Qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale) is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.
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It's a term used in philosophy. That doesn't mean qualia exist. There are many terms used in philosophy to discuss things that don't exist. "Qualia" is one of those.

Go and change Wikipedia; The public is misinformed.
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If you had actually bothered to read the article, or if you knew anything about the philosophy of the mind, you would have noticed that there is a long, long list of problems with the very notion of qualia.

Or to put it simply, qualia don't exist.
 
Ok, wich term do you prefere to describe 'taste', 'smelling', seeing colors, etc.
It's just a matter of agreement. What term do we chose?
 
Everything you've mentioned is explainable.

It's one thing to shove Woo into gaps. It's entirely another to insist there is a gap where there isn't one because you have so much Woo you have to shove it somewhere.
 
Joebentley said:
It's one thing to shove Woo into gaps. It's entirely another to insist there is a gap where there isn't one because you have so much Woo you have to shove it somewhere.
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Belz said:
You are confusing the limits of your personal knowledge with those of science.
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Pixymisa said:
In fairness, a lot of philosophers agree with him.

In unfairness, they're idiots.
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I'm sorry, but this won't help me. I don't learn anything from these answers. They are offensive. Please tell me why the other mind problem is not a problem and why 'qualia' is not a good term instead of 'experiences"?
 
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Maartenn100 said:
I'm sorry, but this won't help me. I don't learn anything from these answers. They are offensive. Please tell me why the other mind problem is not a problem and why 'qualia' is not a good term instead of 'experiences"?
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I expected that these good answers would not be able to help you.
 
Maartenn100 said:
I'm sorry, but this won't help me. I don't learn anything from these answers. Please tell me why the other mind problem is not a problem and why 'qualia' is not a good term instead of 'experiences"?
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Fair question.

The problem is, "qualia" is specifically defined as a dualistic term, and dualism is not logically consistent.* Under scientific naturalism, none of the problems in the philosophical discussion of qualia ever arise.

P-zombies, which you mentioned earlier, suffer much the same fate. They don't exist under any self-consistent metaphysics; they're a contradiction in terms. Anything which exhibits all the behaviours of a conscious being is conscious, because consciousness is a behaviour.

Qualia and P-zombies are symptoms of philosophy's greatest failure. Most of what's been written about the mind in philosophy is complete garbage, and winnowing out the bits of not-garbage is a life's work and probably not worth the effort. Stick to science.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science actually rejects failed ideas. Not always quickly, but it gets there.

* Or it proposes a universe that is not logically consistent, which leads to much the same problems.
 
Crosbow said:
I expected that these good answers would not be able to help you.
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Maybe they are 'good answers' but I don't learn anything from this discussion when people don't tell why.
 
The primary thought experiment that has led people to believe that qualia do exist is The Knowledge Argument.

As PixyMisa has highlighted, these approaches are not without criticism. While Dennett has denied the existence of qualia altogether, others have tried to refine the definition.

One common reply to the thought experiment is that when Mary see's red for the first time, she's merely learning an old fact in a new way. Of course this preliminary response is problematic, but it has been further refined. I think the best articulation of this flavour comes from Robert Cummins who suggests in 'Why it doesn’t matter to metaphysics what Mary learns' that:

The Knowledge Argument of Frank Jackson has not persuaded physicalists, but their replies have not dispelled the intuition that someone raised in a black and white environment gains genuinely new knowledge when she sees colors for the first time.[...] We propose an explanation of this particular kind of knowledge gain that displays it as genuinely new, but orthogonal to both physicalism and phenomenology. We argue that Mary’s case is an instance of a common phenomenon in which something new is learned as the result of exploiting representational resources that were not previously exploited, and that this results in gaining genuinely new information.
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Reivax said:
The primary thought experiment that has led people to believe that qualia do exist is The Knowledge Argument.

As PixyMisa has highlighted, these approaches are not without criticism. While Dennett has denied the existence of qualia altogether, others have tried to refine the definition.

One common reply to the thought experiment is that when Mary see's red for the first time, she's merely learning an old fact in a new way.
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Or simply that the argument is flatly contradictory - that Mary does not learn anything new.

It's worth noting that Frank Jackson himself has since rejected the Knowledge Argument and now regards it as a case of intuition leading philosophy astray.
 
Ah yes, another episode of Qualia Red Herring Fishing, or whatever it's called whenever anyone battles about whether or not qualia exists.

The whole, entire question can be bypassed once we recognize that there is a more important question we should be talking about:

HOW do feelings (those typically associated with 'qualia' or otherwise, such as the feeling of free will) emerge within the brain?

Once we get solid answers to that (which science is doing), the whole entire issue of whether or not 'qualia' even exists will seem quaint and perhaps a bit silly.

Some books are starting to get into that: The book I mentioned earlier: Self Comes to Mind by Damasio is my favorite, so far. Consciousness: An Introduction by Blackmore is very comprehensive.

I am currently reading Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. It is incredibly dry, actually, for a book on humor. And, too often goes into tracts of philosophy. However, it ALSO does something you might not think would be possible: It explains a solid theory as to how jokes work, and how the feeling of mirth evolved in the mind. And, it does it very directly, with no word salad. (Though, it often uses the jargon of philosophers which can resemble word salad, if you're not familiar with them.)
The existence of 'funny qualia' is less important than HOW our minds emerge the feeling of funny experiences.
 
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