How do we explain qualia from a physicalist viewpoint. What is the difference between the physical properties of the brain and consciousness it produces.
If you not quite sure what I mean, have a look at the Mary's room thought experiment.
Mary's room: en.wikipedia.org
We can't explain it.
>What is the difference between the physical properties of the brain and consciousness it produces.
Same difference between the proto-cell and life.
But how though, how does this explain what qualia is?
It's an emergent property.
Yes but how does it emerge? Where does the dichotomy of physical descriptions and mental descriptions lie?
Integrated information theory.
There's nothing to explain really, it's mental masturbation by brainlets.
Mary in the room knows one representation of data and upon release learns another. That's it.
She can't learn the latter on her own due to a limitation of how human brain works, you can't _directly_ input internal data into your retinal neurons. So she has no way to process her knowledge of a color image in the visual cortex.
Another total BS of this type is the Chinese room argument. Fortunately it's harmless, albeit mildly irritating.
>How do we explain qualia from a physicalist viewpoint.
Behaviorism to me seems like the most reasonable approach to explaining.
You just need to not make the assumption "qualia" are literally appearing to people.
Take that assumption away and what you get is people *reporting* they have these qualia. And neither those reports nor the beliefs in their literal reality need a special explanation beyond the scope of ordinary physics. The conclusion is we behave as though "qualia" are real in a world where they aren't because it gives us a simplified way of relating to and communicating to others about the information provided by sensory input.
The only objection I've ever seen to this idea is some variety of "but we know it's really happening, how can you deny your own experiences!" Which doesn't seem like a very compelling objection given the brain can and does promote false beliefs in all sorts of other contexts e.g. there's a whole shitload of academic coverage on the unreliability of eye witness evidence in criminal cases where it seems like when we remember things we're led to believe we have literal photocopies of the events stored that we're pulling up but it's more like we're constructing a story after the fact based predominately on rationalizations of how things "must have been." I suspect "qualia" as we report it vs. what we're really doing when we make these reports is very similar to that difference between memories as we report them vs. what we're really doing when we make those reports, where in both cases it's a rationalization thing masquerading as an "experience" thing.
You don't. Like consciousness, it doesn't exist. It's just fiction for ideologues to justify their retardation.
Ok, this board is completely philosophically retarded.
This thought experiment fails since it is about the difference between knowledge of something and experiencing that thing, not about whether qualia are physical. The mechanism of knowledge and experience are different but both physical.
It's remarkable that it's possible to be far enough up your own arse that you question whether or not you actually experience anything.
I think the Mary's room experiment is kind of flawed to begin with, as one of the statements of the experiment is that Mary knows everything there is to know about how a person works physically.
At that point, if you're physicalist-inclined, you can argue that knowing how you're going to percieve a color is included in the whole "knowing how the brain works physically" package. Thus, Mary will learn nothing new by seeing the color herself.
However, if you're mentalist-inclined, you're going to assume by default that there is something not physical about perception, and she will learn something new by seeing the color.
Thus, the experiment proves nothing and is kind of useless
Here is an experiment I want to run: a section of the visual cortex containing 'globs' is the first to represent colour in its full spectrum (in which we feel we perceive it). If we can find the equivalent area in a rat (which we can vivisect) then using various recording devices/staining/vivisection we can look at what the difference in structure of neurons/their firing is that represent various colours. Then we could possibly change this through gene therapy/electrical interference in humans (making them perceive colours differently, or possibly perceive new colours) and have a candidate for what 'invokes' the qualia of colours. Then if the dualist perspective is true, studying the electrical/informational/physical properties of these cells will allow us to understand what is going on.
It's not actually. We don't have direct access to experience. Read sellars myth of the given. Most important philosopher of 20th century.
There is no evidence it produces any consciousness. Consciousness is unempirical popsci bs that is not even wrong
lol exactly
People have managed to convince themselves that the one thing they can actually be sure of isn't even real. My sides.
I'm sure of a lot of things, doesn't mean it's true
>can actually be sure of
>as in can actually be sure is true
>trusting your brain
brainlet
I'm not even sure my brain exists, at least not to the same degree that I'm sure of the fact that I'm currently experiencing things.
Several of my exes aren't sure my brain exists either of course, but my grounds are philosophical.
>create an arguement where someone knows "everything" about visual information processing
>purposefully exclude a huge swath of that knowledge
>wow guys guess qualia exists!
That is literally this argument.
The integration of information in the brain into more general ideas like colors, textures, rhythms, ideas is the nature of perception. The information is combined and organized and this newly coalesced artificial structure is the mental construction. Neural networks give us a clue of how this might work at a basic level but clearly the brain is more complex and sophisticated.
The way neural networks process images is a really good example of this.
>Ok, this board is completely philosophically retarded.
>It's remarkable that it's possible to be far enough up your own arse that you question whether or not you actually experience anything.
>People have managed to convince themselves that the one thing they can actually be sure of isn't even real. My sides.
As predicted, you never get any real arguments in favor of literal "qualia" existing that aren't some variation of "but we know it's really happening, how can you deny your own experiences!"
Intensity of belief isn't evidence that belief is correct. Stroke patients will often have very certain beliefs in completely untrue ideas like the reason they can't move one of their arms isn't that they're paralyzed but instead that the arm the doctor is asking them about belongs to the patient in the bed across from theirs. Or to use an example that doesn't involve any sort of illness or physical trauma, most blindly accepts blatantly impossible phenomena as true each night while dreaming only to realize after waking that these dream plot points were ridiculous.
Given the choice between the premise "qualia" are literal existing phenomena that transcend physics and need some new science to account for vs. the premise our brains sometimes work in terms of untrue but useful beliefs, I don't see why anyone would choose the former over the latter.
There is a third alternative, which is that simply knowing how the brain produces qualia does not mean you activate the physical mechanism producing qualia. Perhaps with this knowledge Mary can perform brain surgery on herself, activate the mechanism, and experience the color red before stepping outside. Either way, the experiment has nothing to do with the physicality of qualia.
Its completely different. The truth of 'my arm is there' is completely distinct from the sensation that your arm sends to you. Even when your limb is missing, the subjective experience of thinking your arm is there isn't 'false', you are still feeling a subjective feeling. The existence of a subjective experience is self-evident upon it being experienced. You are not making an empirical truth claim. The sensation of red can't be reduced to a belief. 'This is red' can be. The sensation of red itself can't. Assuming the existence of qualia makes way fewer epistemological assumptions than presuming that an external world exists outside our mind, which contains a physical brain, and that our subjective experience is some kind of illusion produced by the evolved advantage of having a false belief. The philosophical starting point for any epistemic structure is the subjective experience you have.
qualia is an illusion, everything is deterministic
what we experience as qualia is just the cumulation of many, many deterministic events
>Even when your limb is missing, the subjective experience of thinking your arm is there isn't 'false', you are still feeling a subjective feeling.
Even people who believe in "qualia" (like Chalmers) don't believe what you're arguing there, which is why the philosophical zombie argument exists. You can't have a philosophical zombie argument unless you believe it's possible for someone to behave as though they're having an experience even though they aren't in reality.
There's subjective information that we can communicate which we have no distinctive subjective experience for, like saying you are 'bored'. Also we can distinguish subjective experiences which are qualitatively unique (colours, sounds, smells, etc) and ones which seem not to be (seeing triangles and squares, the experience of something touching our hands or neck, etc). So any materialistic account of qualia has to explain why these distinctions occur. I.e. why do we encode some experiences as false beliefs involving qualitative differences, while others are encoded as beliefs that things are not qualitatively different.
>There's subjective information that we can communicate which we have no distinctive subjective experience for, like saying you are 'bored'.
"Boredom" and "seeing the color red" are similar in that both are abstractions of more complicated collections of physical details. They both at least in part serve the purpose of letting people speak in terms of a high level pseudo-real object instead of being forced to speak in terms of what your sensory organs and nervous system are literally doing. With boredom in particular though it's less of an abstraction about primary sensory information and more of an abstraction about secondary information fed back on itself in the brain like memories / associations.
Emotions in general work like this, as patterns of your own behaviors that come up in different sorts of situations, in contrast with patterns that are based on similarities of things outside your own behaviors like the pattern of all objects that appear "red" e.g. there isn't much in common in the world outside yourself with an event where you can't get into your house because you lost your keys vs. an event where someone cuts you off in traffic, but there's everything in common with the behavioral routine of anger that you participate in with both cases.
>why do we encode some experiences as false beliefs involving qualitative differences, while others are encoded as beliefs that things are not qualitatively different.
The pseudo-real "qualia" object of "seeing this red door" is distinct from the even more abstract notion of "red" in general because the former is a useful placeholder for dealing with that one particular situation while the latter is a useful placeholder for dealing with many different cases matching that pattern all at the same time.
It's the difference between a picture symbolizing Ulysses S. Grant vs. a more abstract cartoon picture symbolizing people in general like what you see in pedestrian crossing signs.
Qualia are units of measurement of the universe just like numbers. This proves that the only real things in the universe are the maths and feelings.
How is a colour high level though? We can perceive millions of different colours, but we only label them by around 10 different names most of the time. So surely this isn't a 'high level' feature at all. When I say 'red' I mean an arbitrary choice of something like 200k distinct experiences that we have, each of which we feel is uniquely different. If that is a false belief which has evolved, it seems odd that we create so many pseudo-qualitative beliefs for colours yet none at all for other subjective information. It seems more likely to me that the way colour is encoded simply results in some dualistic epiphenomena of colour experience, which does not occur with other forms of information encoding.
> With boredom in particular though it's less of an abstraction about primary sensory information and more of an abstraction about secondary information fed back on itself in the brain like memories / associations.
Why don't we have a distinct qualitative experience for 'boredom' though? At least to me it manifests itself in simply starting to engage in other activities, but I don't have a sense of a boredom 'experience' in the same way as with colours, or hunger, or sounds.
>Physicalism
Wew lad
Biosemiotics
Come on guys I promise it isn't a meme
This nibba gets it