"I will now explain consciousness"

but I do believe in mysticism.

This is probably the strongest argument against Dennett and functionalism.

How is this an argument against functionalism? If mental states are nothing more than functional states, then there is nothing that distinguishes a brain from the water pipe machine, besides the way it's built.

Dennett's view of the mind is already identical to that which you have of the water pipes, he gladly bites this bullet.

does this water pipe brain also have a water pipe body and water pipe organs? Does it inhabit a world made up of water pipe creatures and water pipe matter?

The people who believe others are p-zombies must surely be p-zombies. How one could have an inner life and the slightest shred of cognitive ability and think that other humans aren't human because of the content of their beliefs is just beyond me.

Not necessarily. You could build some sort of interface that will allow you to feed it all its sensory input and body responses.

What experiences the illusion?

Dennett is using illusion in a purely cognitive/functional way. There doesn't have to be any subject being deceived. The illusion is simply the brain referring to things such as "consciosuness" and "me" in a way that isn't metaphysically correct, but is useful for it to do. An evolutionary hack.

But dude I want to feel special and entitled to my existence. I mean, what if, souls, you know?

That does seem a bit dismissive, to imply the brain creates the mind when there's really no need to accomplish the same evolution airy goals

In everyday life I'm apt to take a strictly mechanistic approach to explaining consciousness, and it works. Though I will not delude myself into thinking I know the full nature of the universe with certainty. The latter is why I'm not so keen on him, or the "skeptic" "community" in general. They are religious.

I also don't like that he, rather than simply speaks of, seems to use his friendship with Feynman to advance his own point. Susskind does similar. Feynman was, though he'd despise the term, a philosopher, and had an intellectually honest and solid epistemological foundation behind his way of thinking. ie, he knew what it was to know, had clearly thought through solipsism in a way that was not strictly reactionary, and genuinely wanted truth. These guys don't. They aren't about any of that, and underneath, their value system is all muddled up. Like Dawkins, as a clear example.

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

Qualia is a retarded concept and, although I'm not familiar with his actual arguments, or what this thread is about at all, I'm willing to agree that he has a point.

>Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism"
That's fucking gay as shit though.

>"I will now describe how gravity works"
>gives a hand wavey explanation of how objects at a distance attract one another
>"See? Gravity was just an illusion after all. If you disagree with me you believe in mysticism"

People don't seem to grasp that mental representations carry no objective content. There are no actual photons being used to create the mental image of some memory you have stored in your brain. Thus "qualia" doesn't exist in the sense most people mean. All such impressions are effectively messages the brain tells itself that boil down to, "I am experiencing X." That's all it is. Just a fancy telegram. No actual images are stored anywhere in your brain.

A more efficient mechanism would be for humanity to exist entirely of philosophical zombies than to have any meaningful conscious in the first place.

.t man who doesn't understand the term qualia

Qualia don't exist. They are literally just an illusion. The problem is that the logical explanation for why we think qualia exist is so counterintuitive that it's pointless even arguing with most people, since amount of philosophical training required is significant.

>The problem is that the logical explanation for why we think qualia exist

Been in dozens of "consciousness" threads, and never has a single person posted this so called explanation.

But this exactly what Dennett's argument is, that when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, we all are philosophical zombies.

Here is an explanation I've posted before.

1/2
To understand the problem, you have to first understand that consciousness is a broad term that can mean a lot of different things. Let's first separate them into two different things: Access consciousness and Phenomenal consciousness. Access consciousness refers to the function of the brain: How we react to environmental stimuli, control our behavior, categorize information, and use language. There are no doubts here that biology can materialistically account for everything that goes on here. Phenomenal consciousness however is different. Here we are talking about why it feels like something from a first person perspective; why there's "something that it's like" to be you.

2/2

The brain is a very complicated collection of physical particles, interacting in a complex ways that causes you to behave in complex ways. But that should be all that those particles are doing: behaving. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case. You can correlate emotions with a certain area in the brain and say, when these neurons fire in this and this way with this intensity, that's emotion X. You can have a very complex functional understanding of how emotion X is caused and how it affects behavior. But with all that, it still doesn't tell us anything about what it is like to experience emotion X; it completely ignores the qualitative aspect. Consciousness is the only thing in the universe where asking how something functions doesn't seem to be able to give us any conceivable answers to the question of why it feels like something phenomenally from the inside. I think that highlights a big gap between explaining how something functions, and explaining experience. From this gap, we can infer that the frameworks of science clearly misses something here in terms of the structure/format of the explanation. Going by what science tells us about the world, this phenomenal experience should not be there, we should all be philosophical zombies without phenomenal experience, but we aren't.

Explaining Phenomenal consciousness away as "just an emergent phenomena" misses that there seems to be more than just function emerging. Water has properties not found in a single H2O molecule, but water properties emerging from H2O molecules together with the rest of the environment is something that at least in theory can be fully reducible. This is not the case with phenomenal experience.

why should it not be there. i think this idea that qualia needs explaining is from this misconception that scientific abstract concepts are "true" but in a sense all of these things are mind-dependent and come from your qualic experience. science just explains relations and predictions between things we see in our qualic experience. it doesn't have to explain qualia. qualia is reality. science just abstracts reality, it doesn't tell you what it "really is" that is all inaccessible in terms of physics etc and in a sense therefore it can only exist in an abstracted form. the only "really is" we have is our mind dependent qualic reality. it demands no explanation logically. Science deals with abstractions, not "feels"

And btw, our qualic experiences are identical to things happening in the brain.

And since qualia is identical to our brain processes, it doesn't need to be explained as a separate emergent process. Complex things of access consciousness can but phenomenal doesn't. that is illusory.

There is no hard problem.

With science we try to understand and explain how the world works. While science only works with abstractions, we can use those abstractions to better understand reality. To say that qualia "is reality" is to make a metaphysical assumption on the nature of qualia and an assumption that it can't be understood better.

If you hold that qualia doesn't need to be explained because qualia is simply "reality", then I just focus on what the nature of reality is that lets matter have first person phenomenal experiences.

>No actual images are stored anywhere in your brain
What does this even mean? You're talking nonsense based on an extremely narrow and esoteric definition of "storage" and "actual" X. By this definition there is no "actual" anything, whether macro, micro, or fundamental.

Reactionary opinions are the worst, most compartmentalized, disjointed hackjobs you will ever run into. It's all built on emotional desire.

Would a brain with no senses have the same kind of consciousness we have?

I feel like some of those groups are not exactly distinct but I don't feel like arguing about it

>
>>No actual images are stored anywhere in your brain
I don't really like this meme. No specific images are stored in a specific physical place but that's not really an accurate representation of how memory is stored.

Living systems are more like a computer in the classical sense that while living they are computing. When computers were invented they didn't have external storage they just ran programs. So our memories are less like a set of bits on a hard disk and more like the array of binary values in RAM while performing a function.

When you think of "Dog" the array shifts and you draw different meanings from different parts of the brain. Say the image value for Dog=12 so to image Dog your brain calls parts 2+4+6=12 and together this is "Dog". But if someone says "Show me Dog" ie Show me 12 there is no 12 in your stream of consciousnesses there is only 2+4+6. Another person may arrive at Dog with 1+1+3+7 and when you try to directly relate your concept of Dog with theirs you find it does not "match".

You can arrive at 12 through 2+4+6 or 1+1+3+7 but the overall state of the whole array will be in two different patterns for the two different calculations. Furthermore everything is self-referential and recursive so it different and then again it will be different every time you access it because it will be at a different place in the stack.

In this sense memory is a functioning(in motion) time-space hologram.

That image can be reduced to just substance dualism and functionalism. The rest are either subsets or related philosophical perspectives that don't meaningfully alter the core disposition.

None of this debate has changed for several centuries.

>Implying we're not all p-zombies
Lol who cares? You're brain is just a bunch of analog processes controlled by chemical reactions and little zaps of electricity.

>You're
Fuck I really am a p-zombie, welp just disregard my post

>No specific images are stored in a specific physical place but that's not really an accurate representation of how memory is stored.
That's about as relevant as whether an image is stored/ represented contiguously, its pieces indexed, or if it's generated via some function. It's all the same, ultimately an image can be rendered. A state within a given machine whereby the information that image is composed of, can be used in various ways. Whether that's rasterization into pixels, geometry extraction / gradient recognition and complex object recognition in the brain, or whatever. The underlying nature of computation, (ie signalling, and signal processing), is something all machines the universe allows to exist, are slave to.

>Show me 12 there is no 12 in your stream of consciousnesses there is only 2+4+6.
Numerical storage and representation in the brain varies, and can be mapped in various ways (altering its representation, whereby converting back to numbers might not be necessary). I tend to either create false memories and tag them as such (like you would a dream), loop them through the speech and auditory processing buffers, or hold it in the visual buffer and then extract arbitrarily into working memory. How networks of cells maintain state that can be translated to numbers is still not known.

>memory
Memory is just state. Memory is the creator of reality whether you're a rock or a brain.

dumb fuck

Read Stanislas Dehaene's "Consciousness and the Brain". There is a reason almost no actual neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, AI researchers take any of the "hard problem" nonsense seriously.

>There is a reason almost no actual neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, AI researchers take any of the "hard problem" nonsense seriously.

I'm not doubting you, but can you give me some citations on the lack of support from those professionals? Because all the Wiki gives me is "well it's debated a lot and inconclusive"

fbqb
The only people who take him seriously are reductionist fanatics who think he proves materialistic hard determinism but it's like creationists and 'christian scientists' where basically it's just uncritical mutual agreeing and mindless opinion validation.

It's hard to give evidence for a "lack" of anything... but if you look at most of the major proponents of things like "the hard problem of consciousness", they're almost always philosophers.
Also, the reason I say to read Dehaene's Consciousness and the Brain is because it explains just how much we actually know about the neural correlates of consciousness... and I think a lot of people who buy in to the "hard problem" do so because they don't really know how much we know about how the brain works. We know A LOT.

It's not that they "don't take it seriously", it's simply that there isn't anything to be done or said about it.

Open your mouth and generate output, for what? Use it directly, for what? Consider it widely in your field, with your colleagues, for what?

It is not about taking it seriously (which betrays your underlying attitude), it's just about a lack of relevance and utility. Just like sollipsism, while immensely useful and meaningful in a personal sense, is not widely considered.

Stop bothering to talk shit like a tribal ape, and use your head.

Also, one more thing... Patricia Churchland wrote a really excellent analysis of "the hard problem" that she called "the hornswaggle problem".

Makes you wonder what sort of consciousness the universe with its zillions of brains and galaxies and dark matter has.

ah cock swaggling. mhmm love to see a girl swaggle a cock like shes gargling warm milk on a hot summers day.

neuroscientists don't take the hard problem seriously because they don't know about it or they know about it but it's too scary, or most likely because they're too busy doing their job of crispring some genes into brain damaged mice and quantifying synaptic activity patterns.

you can't be conscious if you're not conscious of something. consciousness requires sensory inputs and as the brain is not conscious of its own inner workings, i would say its likely the universe is not conscious unless its consciouss of something outside of itself. you see, consciousness is a model; one side of a mapping.

the hard problem has nothing to do with neuroscience. its a myth.

>We know A LOT
Do we know how and why we have qualia? Why are little electric pulses in a tangled chunk of axons like anything?
I think a lot of people underestimate the hardness of the hard problem because they're not philosophers.

what do you think the hard problem is and why is neuroscience not relevant to it?

because all neuroscience is doing is trying to uncover the causal dependencies in the brain and the brains relation to the outside world. it doesn't need to know why things are like something. it makes no difference to the explanation.

we dont need an explanation for qualia because all science is doing is trying to find causal dependencies and abstract models of the universe. it doesnt actually relate to how things are in a metaphysical way. thats why some people like to think of science in terms of pragmatism; purely in terms of prediction. when science has models of electrons or any other phenomena, its not trying to describe it in a visceral way. it cant. it just describes its behaviour. that doesnt mean the visceral thing doesnt exist though its probably hidden from us in terms of what we can actually perceive. its the same for qualia. thats the visceralness of existence. we dont have to explain that. thats that. neuroscience is trying to look at causal dependencies. we forget that everything about qualia we perceive through qualia too yet we dont find a need to explain it because the science is the abstract part. one thing to see is that the world doesn't owe us explanations. we just look for them. qualia doesnt owe explanation. it is the firing of cells and if there were no qualia there would be no cells. they are dependent. they are eachother. it is existence. when you start asking "why is this the way it is" you get into absurdity because you aren't asking deducible questions about causal dependencies. youre just asking why isnt this like something else when we only have that hypothesis because we have imagination.

There is no "qualia"... just as there is no "vital force" in all life. People used to think that there existed this "élan vital" that existed in all living things, and it is what separated inanimate objects from animate ones. People simply couldn't conceive of the idea that life was simply chemistry... thats it. Even today, many layman have a hard time understanding that.
But thats ALL life is... chemical reactions. And similarly, there is no "qualia"... there are only complex systems of interconnected neurons and chemical neurotransmitters. That's it. I know it's hard to grasp... but that's all we are.

Neuroscience is a bottom up mechanistic approach. It's reverse engineering.

"the hard problem" really just boils down to the argument from ignorance... or the argument from personal incredulity. "I don't understand how it could be... therefore it cannot be"

neuroscience can be top down too

>consciousness is spoken about
>qualia is the main focus
>the gaining of information and the forming of mental intent is just handwaved over and rejected as illusion
>skip over how information is inherently teleological in nature and using information to deny the reality of information

Yeah, I suppose it is bidirectional, and incorporates a number of scales. Just talking in comparison with something generally top down, like psychology and aspects of philosophy.

>Claim to have proof of anything
>Base chain of axioms on the mind and senses
>Use the mind and senses to prove their own validity
>Irreducible self referential truth
>Even if a machine -was- the entire universe. it could not veritably get around this
>Natural law

neuroscience is becoming increasingly top-down in terms of things like dynamic causal modelling, functional networks and their topology and ideas such as the free energy principle.

have you heard of our lord and savior Juergen Schmidhurber?

>there is no qualia
>cogito ergo sum

You can't just start your argument with something patently false and then try to support your argument from there.

Trying to dismiss the problem of qualia by ignoring its existence is a fool's errand. We might all just be chemicals, but to imply there is no you or I because "dude chemicals" without ever trying to ask or answer the question of "What makes these bundles of chemicals have subjective experience" is the worst way to act like you're somehow enlightened over the matter.

In 20 years, "qualia" will be remembered alongside "phlogiston" and "elan vital" as debunked ideas used to refer to a poorly understood phenomenon up until we learned how it actually worked.

?
You what

I don't give a shit about the Problem of Qualia. I care about the Problem of Intentionality.

You heard me.

...

Not even Descartes accepted cogito ergo sum as an end, valid answer. His subsequent meditations go down other avenues.

See:

"You can't just deny the existence of elan vital... I am alive... you are alive. To imply that we aren't alive simply because we're chemicals without ever trying to answer "What makes these chemical reactions breathe and move?" is foolish.

It's the same thing. Many of the top philosophers of the day were proponents of vitalism. You're falling into the same trap.

hes not saying theres no experience, hes saying qualia isnt separate from the chemical reactions. again, you try to assume everything needs an explanation. things just exist and we draw lines on the dots to link their causal structure. thats what science is doing. wqualia is the existence. you get to the point of asking why is the electron the electron. it makes no sense. your need to explain qualia is from the confusion of being able to see things from both a third and first world perspective.

the chemical reactions are the breathing and moving. you're asking something tautological.

I know. I was making a point.

let me rephrase and see if someone can help me use better terms

The brain is an array of binary switch dependent gated circuits in which each can hold a charge from 0.1v to 1.0v but not zero(for example). If a charge is > 0.5v the switch opens the gate.

The whole brain must have a total charge of 100v but it can distribute the charges among its trillions of circuits. The "static" array states if you were to capture them in frames correspond to sensory experience and you remember by triggering these array states to form a "ghost" of past or imagined experiences.

A lot of switches hold no function except to store extra charge in locations where it might be needed. A lot of switches are dependent on other switches. Generally a change in one switch will cause a cascade switches and gates to open changing the configuration of the entire array. Multiple changes are happening in multiple locations simultaneously from multiple inputs in recursive feedback loops that either compliment or cancel out to form a cohesive experience.

This still doesn't explain why I am able to choose to recall experiences. It really has no bearing on consciousness. Its like were watching a movie and I'm asking why Romeo and Juliet suicide and you are saying "Well the laser in the blu-ray player decodes the data off the disc and this is transmitted to the TV and displayed as pixels"

neuroscience is autism

That doesn't quite match the consistent patterns we see from fmri studies which show people form the same concepts using the same brain areas.

Sure, that doesn't mean the process is similar down to individual neurons, it probably is not even possible, due to variations on neurodevelopment.

On the other hand

>that old hackneyed brain = computer meme

No, brains are not computers. They don't operate with bits and don't use numerical systems to represent something. You could call it a metaphor at best. You could say brains are like computers in some way, but not a literal sense.

When you separate things that much from their origins, they'll always sound absurd.

"The brain is an array of binary switch dependent gated circuits..."
"This still doesn't explain why I am able to choose to recall experiences. It really has no bearing on consciousness. Its like were watching a movie and I'm asking why Romeo and Juliet suicide and you are saying "Well the laser in the blu-ray player decodes the data off the disc and this is transmitted to the TV and displayed as pixels"

Is like saying "My body is individual DNA strands... that still doesn't explain how my heart beats."
or
"My car is made up of steel molecules bound together with aluminum molecules... still doesn't explain how it can go 100 mph on a highway"

You're overlooking the whole process, which is the point.

When you explain the process... you explain how its done. Hence Stanislas Dehaene's claim that (paraphrasing) "once we solve the easy problems, the hard problem will evaporate"

stop using the analogy to a switchboard or whatever fucking analogy that is. its retarded and unrealistic.

what do you mean it doesn't explain why you can choose to recall experiences? that is a brain process...

and that metaphor is shit. the plot of romeo and juliet vs. the tv projecting it is like how the brain works vs how physics works. i can rearrange that question as someone asking how a tree falls down in physics terms and getting an explanation of how the brain sees it. its not a good metaphor for consciousness.
again

dumb fuck

the hard problems are a non-problem. it has no consequence or predictions at all. its simply asking why something is something. its tautological. why is an electron an electron and not a quagtron

>This still doesn't explain why I am able to choose to recall experiences.
Now we arrive at the core. The experience of "choice". Choice is simply the experience of the brain (a state machine) moving through states as it attempts to arrive at a state the rest of its systems accepts as a conclusion, subsequently stores it, and lets the process as a whole fade. There is no real branch point at your point of "choosing", and the whole process is satisfactorily explained via a series of mechanical state changes guided by intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

Recall a childhood memory. Did you? It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't just spurred you to do so.

Why would he worry about being disagreed with if it's all just an illusion, he can't really be conscious of it

intentionality is a spook
it's all just chemicals bruh
t. thc
Except you miss the point entirely.
A complete description of chest matter in motion is a complete description of breathing. But what qualia is the chest experiencing?

huh?

>it's all just chemicals
>can't explain how it's chemicals without refuting yourself

yyour hard problem will never be answered. qualia = neurons. simple as.

Mate can you even read. See

The problem he has is he's trying to shoehorn 13th century theology into present day neuroscience. He's arguing for Thomism, m8.

wut

If any of you can properly restate the arguments people make for the hard problem as clearly as possible (doesn't have to be long, simply explain why we think it poses a problem for science), and then explain why it's misguided, it would at least convince me you understand the arguments (and maybe change my mind).

Where in the world did you get that at all from what I've said?

Do you just not get it?
They died because they were in love and thought the other had died. Pixels on a screen have nothing to do with experiencing love or irony. This is why I said neuroscience is autism.

>Recall a childhood memory. Did you? It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't just spurred you to do so.
This doesn't really address why there is a "you" or "I". Why there is a subjective experience. I could accept this to be true and all it would say is that experience is deterministic not where/why/how the experience itself comes to be. The only reason "I" have a childhood memory is because my serial machine state body has a subjective experience of a childhood where are those states stored? Where are the hard drives that I recall that configuration from?

I second this.
If reductive materialism isn't true then by law of excluded middle Thomism is.

The idea is that there are "easy problems" of consciousness (how the brain computes numbers, how we change our attention, etc, the mechanistic HOWs), and then theres the "hard problem" of consciousness, which is how all those mechanistic operations form "qualia" and "experiences".
The reason I (and Dan Dennet, and Stanislas Dehaene, and Pat Churchland, and everyone in the field) think it's a nonsense "problem" can best be explained by analogy.

The terms used... "qualia" and "phenomenal experience" are the same as "vital energy" and "phlogiston". They're used as shortcut terms to describe the whole processes happening as a result of the "easy problems".

An analogy would be:
"The easy problems of life are things like 'how does the heart pump blood, how do the muscles contract, etc, mechanistic questions... but the hard problem of life is 'how do those mechanistic processes form the 'elan vital' in all living things and the 'phlogistic fire of our metabolism'.

Point is... proponents of the hard problem are taking for granted that "qualia" exists simply because "it's obvious!". But I'm saying that the answers to the easy problems, once we have them all (which we don't yet)... will explain fully how consciousness works just like the easy problems of life explain fully how the "elan vital" works (in other words, how we are alive).

>This doesn't really address why there is a "you" or "I". Why there is a subjective experience.
I know this, and have agreed multiple times. We simply do not know. We will likely never know.