Using Dennett's definition of qualia, how is it possible for us to not have a soul?

>OP spends his entire life studying gay sex
>"wow there must be outside of gay sex"

...

Maybe instead of writing unfunny, uninteresting posts about posts about posts about how posts don't have any content, you could post some content.

try sartre bitch lol

Qualia is the modern spooky big daddy, the ruler in the domain of contemporary philosophical tautology. Much like God, its definition precludes deductive or inductive proofs of it. It is a dogma

If you were actually concerned about content, you would have critiqued the original post I was responding to, since it lacks any substantive content that can't be reduced to whining. It adds nothing to the thread that can't be reduced to, "Dennett is badman." Instead, I'm guessing you are the original poster, and you are massively butthurt about not being able to defend your point so you resort to empty, fat-kantbot platitudes about this or that being content with no actual supporting reasons. I'm seeing a pattern here, of the pseud, "I'm unable to actually argue" kind.

Dennett is responding to analytic philosophers who believe that qualia is a distinct ontological category. Why do you paint analytics with such a broad stroke?

Qualia is merely another name attempting to describe the creative nothingness, and to presuppose its existence beyond the Ego has been the greatest failure and the greatest curse on human dialectic.

Qualia isn't a dogma, it's just a word referring to things like "redness" or "loudness", which obviously exist in some sense. People who talk about qualia aren't suggesting that qualia are some separate, reified things.

Doesn't Dennett claim that qualia don't exist? Is that different from claiming they're not a distinct ontological category?

>>Qualia isn't a dogma, it's just a word referring to things like "redness" or "loudness", which obviously exist in some sense
substantives only exist in the fantasy of a few rationalists

>Science tells us
stopped reading here

I think Dennett has some deep flaws.
This comment really doesn't seem like you've read anything he's written though.

Why obvious?

Dennett's not really about "doesn't exist". He thinks it's irresponsible reductionism.

He posits largely that qualia has no claim to a collection of phenomena that describe consciousness in any functional way.

Rather that the ways in which people try to construct qualia always arbitrarily links together entirely different phenomena, that is unlikely to have the centralised cause that categorising it in such a way implies.

At least that's my understanding.

He could be making an even stronger point.

Agree.

Why WHO can see it?

It would not imply that at all. Rather, not exclusively. Any number of alternate theories could be made to souls origin, and in fact, it could be uncreated.

Then there is no proof anything at all exists. Thanks for demonstrating why stirner is mentally retarded.

>Thanks for demonstrating why stirner is mentally retarded.

Clearly that post reflects Stiners thought after all its not like some random user could post bullshit with a picture of him

Humans. The conjecture is that we'll never understand why the computation the brain does gives rise to subjective experience, even though we'll probably be able understand the computation the brain does and how it does it.

>computations in the brain

what the fuck are you even talking about?

>subjective experience

what the fuck are you talking about? experiences are absolutely objective. the sensation of 'green' is precisely what it is and not subject to interpretation as other than green according to a substantive precept. just as pain is indeed pain and nothing else, experiences are by definition objective events, if this were not so we could be self aware, as there would be no consistent stream of consciousness which could learn to know itself. it would be awareness without knowledge of awareness such as the lower animals experience.

>pain is indeed pain and nothing else
>A=A
do you have a non-circular definition for pain?

I read 6 of his books as a teenager before I started reading actual philosophy.

Is it some badge of honour to read 140-page phony pop philosophy? He basically publishes his undergraduate think pieces.

Quine was at least a real philosopher. He mostly sucked ass too but at least he did real philosophy.

>It would not imply that at all.
It would imply a potential for all souls in the beginning. Perhaps even in something authentic.

A is in fact A.

'circular' is one way of saying 'axiom', i suppose.

are you actually questioning the concept of identity?

>It would imply a potential for all souls in the beginning. Perhaps even in something authentic.

i haven't the faintest clue what this means.

Does analytic philosophy care about anything other than epistemology?
The entire tradition is like centuries worth of tl;dr

This. I read idiot Dennett when I was 6 years old. I read everything of his, and every one of his idiot footnotes. He was an idiot then and an idiot now. He's an idiot. You'd have to be an imbecile to read idiot Dennett.

Analytic "philosophy" doesn't care about epistemology. They're 200+ years behind on philosophy of mind.

oh yes, 200 years behind.

because we've really achieved a high level of understanding in our society about how the mind and self and consciousness work, as evidenced by the immense virtue displayed by our citizens, the low rates of mental illness and mental weakness, and the high amount of people who are really personally powerful in a way that shows they understand themselves and how their own mind works.

that was sarcasm, obviously, today most people know far less about mind than people did in the past. we're regressing in that regard.

Uhhhhh nigger Chalmers has been talking about this for like 40 years you fucking retard

Why are all reductive Materialists so consistently boring on top of being consistently wrong? It's like their entire dialectic is comprised of the same prepackaged words clusters and chains of ideas.

>Therefore, what is the essential difference between both? The perspective. It will never be possible to literally put yourself in the place of other
Nigger has never heard of blindsight; formerly sighted individuals lose some vision because of cortical brain damage, but are still able to detect movement in their blind spot. They feel like they're just guessing which direction an object has moved in, but are remarkably accurate. This shows that you can have a partial absence of qualia of the same sense in the same person, at the same time.
Likewise cortically deaf people will, in some cases, reflexively orient their heads towards sudden, loud sounds, even though they can't consciously hear anything.

>it is only an aid for the articulation of responses to the input.
It's not even an aid, it's just the most superfluous thing there is to the processes of the human-machine.

>experiences are absolutely objective. the sensation of 'green' is precisely what it is and not subject to interpretation as other than green according to a substantive precept
I don't think he meant 'subjective' in the sense of 'subject to interpretation.'

I can't see how what you wrote deny anything from what you quoted. Isn't OP's text basically saying that qualia isn't needed to the events of input-processing-output? Even though the last sentence I quoted seems to contradict what he was trying to say, idk.

>it's just
You just reduce something from {what it is} to {what you want it to be so that you can ignore it}.

What? I don't ignore that there's subjectivity.
Besides, I think you meant:
>You just reduced something from {what I think it is} to {what you think it is}

The interaction problem disproves qualia.

It doesn't. It only shows that there's no causal relation between qualia and physical things, we still can have a parallelism.

No we can't. If there is no interaction, then every claim of qualia is invalid.

Why?

Because if you hold that claims of qualia are valid even though they aren't contingent on the existence of qualia, then, going by the same logic, you can make ANY claim valid.

First, I can't see how one can deny the fact that he has first person experience (and is there any other experience?), so I really can't make sense of 'Qualia aren't real.' Probably there's some semantic misunderstanding underlying their denial.
What you're saying is that qualia can't be proved, and I agree. But I don't believe only in what can be proved, I also believe in what I experience directly and that is... experience itself with its qualia. Are you denying that you're an 'I', a 'first person'?

The interaction problem means that something cannot be "selectively" uncertain. It's either uncertain to everybody, or uncertain to nobody. Information cannot play favorites.

>Information cannot play favorites.
Why? I think you're mixing 'information' in the sense of something experienced or thought, and 'information' in the sense of a scientific fact.

If we took a philosophical zombie and isolated the causal chain of actions that leads to it claiming to have qualia, then tested other people for that causal chain, it could be determined which people are philosophical zombies. If your cause of claiming to experience qualia is determined to be not BE qualia, then you can't have qualia because something caused by one thing can't simultaneously be caused by another thing.

>to be not BE
What did you mean?
I don't believe there can be any way of checking if people are p-zombies or not, as I deny that there can be any causal link between qualia and physical things. I know I'm not a p-zombie, however... I could still be one and deny it, as my physical act of writing this is determined solely by physical events. The problem is: you can't deny to yourself that you have a first person perspective (well, I believe you're not a p-zombie...). As for the use of qualia in science, I believe they're completely unnecessary, superfluous, dispensable.

>you can't deny to yourself that you have a first person perspective
But you've already claimed that there is no connection between the physical(act of denying) and qualia.

I don't know why, but it's annoying. Typically a reductive materialist one speaks to online, if he doesn't know your ideas already, will begin by assuming that if you think there is a hard problem of consciousness, you must be a Christcuck... they have their mental framework all set up to shoot down religious arguments, which is fairly easy, and they have a hard time processing critiques of reductionism from the direction of the hard problem.

One almost can't help but wonder if they might be p-zombies.

Define "consciousness".

That's why I said 'to yourself.' What I was trying to say is that you can't have a subjective negation of subjectivity. Now, you could deny that there's such a thing as 'subjectivity,' but then I will have no idea of what I could say, as such a denial makes no sense to me: I would only continue to ask what you mean by what you say until I could understand it. Anyway, I don't believe that you believe yourself to be a p-zombie, and probably when you're denying qualia you're denying the practicality of the concept (and with this I agree).

But you're just presupposing that this "subjectivity" exists with no basis.

Dan ignores rhodopsin, which ruins his pet theory.

Yeah, it's that fucking simple

I'm only presupposing if we use "presuppose' in a very wide sense. 'Subjectivity' is how I call the experience of 'firstpersonness', it's a given to me, it happens immediately to me, I don't need to 'suppose' it. But I can't force you to believe that I have such an experience, there's no way I can prove it: one can only be sure of one's own experience of it.

>firstpersonness
That's arbitrary though so it can't be used for any kind of formal statement.

Again, it's only arbitrary if we use 'arbitrary' in a very wide sense. I don't choose to have such an experience, so we can't call it 'arbitrary' in a strict sense. If it can be used or if it can't, will depend on the use you want to make: if it's only an introspective use, then it's valid; if it's a scientific use, then it's impossible.

>I don't choose to have such an experience
But you assume that you know what the experience is.

I only assume if we use 'assume' etc... how many times will I have to repeat phrases like this? It's a given, an immediate datum, I don't choose, I don't elaborate it, I don't conceptualise it and then 'presuppose,' it simply happens and is here before me. I can't prove it, you can only take it on faith in the same way I can only by faith believe that other people aren't p-zombies, and it happens instinctively, as I instinctively believe that such and such impressions are the appearance of a pencil. How can I 'assume' anything about an immediate experience? It is what it presents itself to be, and before it I can only be silent.

People wrongly attribute properties to things they experience all the time. This is no different. You don't have perfect knowledge of what it is.

But I'm not attributing anything, indeed there's nothing to attribute. I can attribute properties to something I know via sensations, but I can't do anything about sensations themselves.

But you already have. The word "qualia" as properties associated with it, and those properties are wrong.

Which properties and how are they wrong? I've not read Consciousness Explained as Dennett's ideas seemed pretty vague and based mostly on misunderstandings.

The problem with p-zombies seems to be the following.
>Scientists make models to approach reality
>it doesn't explain all of it
>therefore reality must be cut so that the model fits perfectly

The most problematic property is "passive". It is assumed that qualia produces no action, and this is obviously false because people talk about it, which is an action. Derived from this is the idea of being "private" i.e. the information of the experience cannot be transferred, which is also contradicted by the fact that it evidently produces actions, as the actions transfer information about it.

People talk about it, but it doesn't mean that the qualia are the 'causes.' First, the idea itself of causality is just a practical idea: if cause and effect are discontinuous, then they just happen to follow one another; if they are continuous, only arbitrarily can we call one the cause and another the effect. Now, qualia can't be continuous to people's actions, for the latter are physical and the former are just phenomenal. And if they aren't continuous, only pragmatically can we call them the 'cause' of such actions. About the incommunicability, I still hold that the immediate is incommunicable; we can only communicate mediate representations, i. e., concepts, and even then there's no way to check if it was absolutely communicated.

Now I'm leaving, we continue the discussion tomorrow.

This line of thought could be used to validate ANY idea, so you are showing an obvious bias by only applying it to qualia.

Subjectivity, interiority, the essence of why there's something that it's like to be you (to borrow from Nagel).
To be philosophically precise, there's actually no reason to assume that anything exists outside of consciousness (objective reality could still exist without an opposite pole to consciousness), so the above terms are somewhat misleading.

That really says nothing at all.

You see, hear, feel, and so on. Most people here would probably agree that a dog also sees, hears, feels, and so on. However, most people would probably agree that a rock doesn't. And when you are in deep sleep, you also don't. "Conscious" refers to that quality that is characteristic of the waking you and the dog but is not characteristic of the you in deep sleep or of the rock.

Nitpicking note: Again, to be precise I feel that I must mention that the above is a simplification - to be absolutely precise, one must admit that it is an arbitrary distinction to single out "you", "dog", or "rock" as material beings separated by clear boundaries from other material beings. Indeed, it might be the case that the only things that have a legitimate case for being discrete as opposed to continuous are consciousnesses (that's if there is more than one in the universe, which itself is not clear).

Cont...

I should add, I think, that when I say " that quality that is characteristic of the waking you and the dog but is not characteristic of the you in deep sleep or of the rock", I mean a quality that is not merely a material difference - some arrangement of chemicals, etc. - but rather, the actual fact that the waking you, for example, has subjective experience, but the you in deep sleep does not. Although, of course, the presence or absence of subjective experience is tightly correlated with material conditions (which chemicals are in the brain, etc.)

But it's not a characteristic of "you", it's a characteristic of the experiences.

But it's still bounded by physics and biology. We can argue about how the activity and arrangement of interacting neurons give rise to experience but to say that conscious experience goes beyond brain activity would be spitting in the face of all the work in neurosciences, tCMR, MRI, lesion studies, and conscious brain surgery that has occurred in the last 100 years. You would also be ignoring the improvement in A.I. and neural networks that led to self driving cars, Go playing, speech recognition, and so on.

I agree... it is difficult to precisely describe the issue using standard language. After all, we are not even sure whether it makes sense to consider anything to exist "outside" of consciousness.

> We can argue about how the activity and arrangement of interacting neurons give rise to experience but to say that conscious experience goes beyond brain activity would be spitting in the face of all the work in...
Not at all. It doesn't matter how precisely the material correlates of consciousness are described my science - the essential mystery of the connection between the material and subjective experience remains. This mystery has not been clarified to even the slightest degree by all of the advancement in material science. Even if material science reached a point at which it was possible to artificially construct arrangements of matter that seemed every bit as conscious as humans (and even if they were every bit as conscious as humans), if material science never explained how the material arrangement gives rise to subjective experience, the mystery would remain as untouched as it is now.

>God, I forgot how fucking retarded Dennett is.
He has a phd from Oxford and a degree from Harvard and has received TWO Guggenheim Fellowships.
You are some fucktard who masturbates to futa porn

To put it in plainer words, even if we learned how to literally build conscious machines, unless we somehow figured out how their material arrangement gave rise to subjective experience, the hard problem of consciousness would remain completely untouched by this scientific progress. This is in no way, shape or form an insult to science. On the contrary, it would be an insult to science to claim, without good reason for so claiming, that physicalist science is capable of explaining all things.

Dennett has avoided the hard problem for years He even wrote a book called Consciousness Explained that doesn't explain consciousness in the slightest. I'd say this opens him up to a bit of light-hearted mockery.

I like to joke that he should have titled the book "Consciousness Hand-Waved Away".

>when "philosophers" and ""scientists"" try to explain qualia, something that is, by definition, ineffable

haven't we learned anything? "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"

Then it's not actually a problem, just like "why does the electromagnetic force exist" is not a problem.

If hard-core physicalists admitted that they have no answer for the hard problem other than to postulate consciousness as something that just "is" in the universe, in the same way that the electromagnetic force just "is", I would not criticize them at all. I agree. It is the dogmatic reductionists, the people who insist that consciousness must be reducible to material phenomena which cause it, who I find annoying.

Cont... And I find the people who claim that there is no such thing as consciousness to be even more annoying. Unless they are p-zombies, I guess, in which case it makes sense.

Well now you're entering the realm of epistemology. What is knowledge? How would we ever know if we found a representation that accurately describe subjective experience?
You're taking the philosopher's approach that is binding everything to language. The engineer's approach is to build a fully human a.i. that can self recognize and learn from experience. Right now the engineers have achieved the learning from experience aspect. It is only a matter of time to reach self recognition.

I disagree with you on saying no advancement has been made. We all know about trans cranial magnetic resonance and how they can enhance our subjectivity, not to mention psychedelics and meditation. There's also head concussions study on boxers that gets hit in the head, go on fighting for another round and have no recollection on what they previous experience while they were in the fight. Theses studies provide very valuable clues to our goal of accurately describing consciousness. And to say material science will never explain the phenomena of "qualia" or subjective experience (if philosophers will ever agree to pinpoint it to a phenomenon) is rather pointless since what else will? Whatever you try to do, you'll be bounded in language.

Scientists and engineers want to elicit the principles that makes up the phenomena of consciousness because that want to reproduce it in a machine, basically transitioning between carbon and silicon. If we take consciousness as is and not try to reduce it to a general set of principles than there will never be a fully general artificial intelligence agent. There is no reason not to try since we already have success in transferring some aspect of learning capability to machines in the form of neural networks.

>You're taking the philosopher's approach that is binding everything to language.

Not one bit. I use words, of course, to communicate (perhaps not very skillfully)... but I am actually talking about something rather simple (although mysterious).

I can imagine an extremely intelligent being, capable of advanced problem-solving, that is not conscious. There is nothing I can think of that would make such a being impossible.

But it seems that humans are intelligent beings that ARE conscious. Humans have subjective experience - I think only utter hand-waving reductionists would deny that. So then I ask: does matter give rise to this subjective experience? It certainly seems so... after all, consciousness is very well correlated with the states of matter. Taking drugs affects my consciousness, being tired affects it, and so on... so it seems that matter certainly strongly affects consciousness. Ok, then it should be a simple matter to explain the mechanism by which matter gives rise to consciousness, right? Whoops, no. It turns out that no-one (to my knowledge) has ever been able to even put one tiny little dent in the question of what this mechanism is. It is an utter mystery.

> disagree with you on saying no advancement has been made ...

There has been tremendous advancement in figuring out how changes in matter affect consciousness. There has been tremendous advancement in figuring out how changes in matter affect intelligence, thinking, problem solving, memory, etc. But there has been zero advancement in figuring out how matter gives rise to consciousness (if it does).

Why would it not be possible to create a hyper-intelligent machine that is not conscious? I see no reason to believe that consciousness must be present for a being to be capable of extremely advanced problem-solving. A chess computer, presumably, has no subjective experience - yet it can beat humans. I can extrapolate from this by a factor of millions and billions and imagine a machine that is actually better at general problem-solving and pattern analysis than humans, yet has no subjective experience.

But the problem is that it's called a problem in the first place.

I myself prefer to call it a "mystery". The term "hard problem of consciousness" was invented, it seems, by Chalmers... and keep in mind that he had (and has) people arguing against him who are dogmatically convinced that it's just a matter of time before neuroscience, etc. explains everything there is to know about subjectivity. Calling it a "problem" makes sense in that context because it contrasts the issue against the arguments of people who claim that there is no issue at all.

>Ok, then it should be a simple matter to explain the mechanism by which matter gives rise to consciousness,

It should be simple if people would define what they mean. Neuroscientists would simply say brain activity. Like how they decide when to pull the plug on a coma patient. But philosophers can't seem to agree on this definition or provide one of their own that can be found outside of language.

>But there has been zero advancement in figuring out how matter gives rise to consciousness (if it does).
Why don't you try? Maybe you'll win a nobel prize.
But I disagree. Libet's experiment shows us that unconscious activity affects conscious acts. It could be an interaction of a bunch of different systems within our brain that individually are predictable but overall is unpredictable. Consciousness could be a meta system that governs the interactions between all these different lower neural systems. From goal recognition and generation, memory recollection, pattern recognition, language processing, self recognition, emotion, and so on.