owleye

John....

"Yes, common physiology, reality and cultural references would be (some of the?) preconditions. I don;t see these as insuperable obstacles."

Common physiology and reality may be signficant pre-conditions, but cultural references form part of what needs explaining. That is, cultural references are shared concepts. The deeper philosophical problem is how a shared concept can occur in the first place given only a common physiology and a common reality. Your theory would seem to be that our common physiology maps external reality into the same brain state. Thus, if we could find the brain state that corresponded to car in one person we would find that same brain state in another person. The concept of mountain or the concept of river would be configured identically in all persons who possessed that concept (otherwise it wouldn't be a shared concept).

"I go on a roller coaster. I go yahoooo! You do the same. Shared experience. Without shared experiences I doubt we'd have much to talk about."

That's precisely my point. How in the world are you going to be able to provide a third person account of any experience without it being a shared experience? What do robots experience when they go "yahoooo" on a roller coaster?"

"Also, consider an experiment where the subject gives a narrative account of their experience. Later, information regarding the brain activity that went with those experiences is examined. Over time I think we'll discover the correlation between thought and brain activity to derive improved theories of mind."

Perhaps so, but until it knows what a thought is I'm pretty sure it will not be able to do so.

"I would say 'An instance of a thought occurs when events XYZ take place in the brain.'

What is the distinction you are driving at such that "an instance of a thought" is to be distinguished from "a thought?"

"Thoughts are highly contextual, so you's need to know a lot more about the brain status to deduce or completely explain what the thought was about."

That's what the "XYZ" stands for. It represents all the brain activity that corresponds to the thought produced.


"The first person account "It is blue" needs location information, context for blueness, the identity of "It" etc."

Interesting, but we're talking about brain activity (what I take to be your "internal reality"). Supposing you discover that a certain activity in a given neural network produces the experience of 'blue' (based on a first person account), does it follow that the experience of blue is the same in all persons who have the identical brain activity? That is, would this make it a shared experience?

"Go check the dictionary, then. How can one express something one has determined unless one defines it?"

Very easily. Just tell me what it is you have in mind. Unfortunately you don't know the meanings of all the words you use (including what it means to define a word) and this has prevented a coherent picture of what your thesis is. And it is this which has been the target of my criticism.

"How is the definition meaningful unless one has first determined the facts? You are at liberty to raise semantic points if you wish but I think this one's minor - above I explain why and if you have a problem with it I'd be grateful for an explanation why instead of just your opinion and accusation."

In your mind, I suppose, you thoughts are all crystal clear. The problem is in how it is being expressed by the language you use. The language you is the mechanism you have of expressing not only the ideas you have, but also the defense of these ideas. Until the language is clear it will be difficult for me to understand what you've been thinking about. Moreover, the language you use suggests to me that you have not given the issues sufficient thought. The meaning of words is of great significance not only in the expression of thoughts but in communication of them. Finally, addressing philosophical problems has meant an increased awareness of the difficulty of expressing certain concepts (and the thinking that occurs through them) clearly. The reason why I did not respond to what you thought were contradictions was precisely because I wanted you to appreciate that difficulty. Unfortunately you took this as an opportunity to call into question my own view of things (to put it charitably).

"The signals, if you will permit the term, within the brain convey the (encoded?)content. How we interpret these signals "consciously" is not clearly known."

Quite so. Signals are involved. All my questions and concerns have been about what you would refer to as conscious perception, about which you suggest is not clearly known. Since I have little interest in anything else, I should have realized that I've wasted my time.

"So you can read my mind? Some explanations are at a higher level of abstraction than others, hence my use of the term meta-explanations. I would have thought that the straightforward title of this thread makes is crystal clear what I'm looking for. I'd be obliged if you quit the innuendo, especially as you don't seem willing to provide an alternative explanation or reasons why the mind/body border is a chimera (or whatever it is you wish to propose)."

To seek something is to know what the something is that is being sought. My "innuendo," as you call it, calls into question that you don't know what consciousness is such that you would know it when you came across it.

owleye

DRFseven

Cognition seems to involve a continuous looping process where multiple systems are coupled in a dynamic way - there is a continuous crossing back and forth between environment, body, and mind.

Why do you go to the store and buy the, now famous, Chex Mix? What complex interactions took place? Your lucid thought was something like "I think I'll go get Chex Mix now.", and you might even "go back a step" and reflect that you saw an ad about Chex Mix that stimulated your appetite, or that you skipped lunch and some biological signaling was likely going on. But unless your attention is drawn to it, you are probably not going to picture your "behaving brain" as it would look being imaged while this process of thinking about getting Chex Mix was going on. You wouldn't realize that thousands of neural transactions were being made that involved habits, associations, weights and motivation in a series of complex inter-level actions between sensory processes, internal and external stimuli, memory, and neural modification.

Conscious thoughts, which are stimulated by both internal and external events (conscious and unconscious thoughts, as well as incoming environmental signals), go on to, themselves, stimulate other conscious and unconscious thoughts. Included in this process are ongoing physical behavior changes (such as the opening of a refrigerator door, the taking in of sights and smells), which result in change of environment which triggers further floods of associations. In this way the "behaving organism" is propelled along by all this interplay.

owleye

owleye:

"Well I think that there is external physical reality and the current realities that we (our brains) perceive that we have based on our current beliefs (based on our interaction with the external physical world)."

This sounds like you are a dualist of the Cartesian sort. There is a physical world and a perceived world. The usual question for dualists is to explain how the two worlds are connected with each other. Because of the difficulty of this problem, many thinkers have abandoned such a view. But perhaps you have a new approach. (From reading below, however, I take it you are a monist of the physicalist sort. There is no mind (except nominally). What is being referred to as the "internal reality" of the mind is instead merely a manifestation of "exernal reality" -- i.e., some physical configuration of neuronal activity.)

"Earlier I said that if something is real (physically reality) then it has to be a part of physical reality. (There is also what is "real" according to someone's beliefs... from their point of view) But I'll just assume "real" refers to physical reality. Physical reality involves physical matter, energy, gravity, time, etc."

One difficulty philosophers have with your "physical reality" is explaining the sense of reality it has in mind. One may give examples of what's real, as you have, but when it comes to determining what one or another of them is supposed to be in itself (i.e., absent how they presumably affect us), it becomes more difficult. We wind up saying that when we observe matter, energy, gravity, etc., what we see are its effects, according to some theory or another that explains such effects in these terms. Thus, we never know anything as it is in itself, but instead know only what its properties are. For example, this limitation prevents us from knowing what an electron is in itself, but by regarding an electron as some sort of particle that localizes properties of charge, mass, and spin, we can get some idea of how it can be distinguished from other things.

"If they really are part of physical reality (i.e. the theories are correct) then those unobservables exist. (Even if they are theoretical and non-existent, the *concept* exists in the scientist's brain as neurally encoded information - if no-one has conceived of those specific non-existent entities then they don't exist at all)"

From the way in which you state this, it is beginning to sound like the underlying reality is information. If so, I think you would be in good company, but in the use above, what is needed is a way of explaining how information encoded in the brain becomes information to us. We might be able to say that information about the location and motion of objects in our environment is captured by the spatio-temporal pattern of different photons interacting with our array of retinal sensors and that such information is then transmitted to some other information processing faculty where it is filtered or otherwise massaged in accordance with some or another need to have it in the form we have it. But none of this explains perception itself, which is the hard problem. (I'm assuming perception includes consciousness of what is being perceived, where I further assume that the person perceiving is aware that it is consciously perceiving it.) That is, all the above information processing, while undoubtedly of great signicance fails to explain consciousness. Indeed, why would such information processing need consciousness at all? It makes no sense from a functionalist viewpoint.

"I think scientific observations/theories would have a high probability of being accurate but not necessarily have absolute accuracy. They would only be able to observe our physical reality... perhaps we aren't in the outermost reality. (Our universe could be in a computer, etc). But I think that within this physical reality, there is just physical matter - no other substances like human souls, etc."

Denying minds (except in a physical sense) is a view that has been offered. The question is then is what would be required to add to the information processing capabilities of robots so that we could say they had minds in the sense we, from a first person point of view, say we do.

"Well I think there's lots of matter in the universe and there's some matter can makes up the Moon entity and some matter than makes up our brains. Using our eyes and brains we can detect and analyse the Moon structure/entity and label it "the Moon". The group of particles (that we indirectly refer to as "the Moon") exists. The particles exist, and so does the group."

This relies on the theory that the particles that comprise the "group" exist. Note that instead of the moon, I could have chosen the brain of a particular person or any other object we perceive. I think your physicalist theory could be improved if you distinguished the form of existing things from its content, by, for example, thinking of things which exist as having a structure (form) based on (say) a dynamical equilibrium of its constituent interacting particles (its content). Thus, the reason that the moon exists is because there is some physical reason for considering its constituents in some dynamic equilibrium. This allows, for example, that the thing which exists (here the moon) would still exist if we replaced all its constituent ingredients with sufficiently similar ones that accomplished the same level of dynamic equilibrium with each other. Notwithstanding this, I'll leave you to form your own ideas of what constitutes reality.

"BTW, in that diagram, the short-term memory is half-data-store and half-process - it's not a proper flow-chart."

Although diagramming is often thought to be a helpful way of organizing our ideas, they usually carry with them philosophical baggage that needs to be explained apart from the diagram in ordinarly language anyway.

"Perception" should be called something like "Basic Sensory Feature Extraction"."

If so, this is unfortunate, since perception (as it is consciously understood) is the only part of the problem that a philosopher would be interested in.

"As far as synchonization goes, that "Perception" box could take in its inputs first, then generate its output. (It needs both inputs to generate the output)"

True enough, but this only restates that synchronization of the two inputs needs to explained.

"Basically the short-term memory (should be renamed "working memory") is a process and a data store that uses emotional data to formulate goals and learn, etc. Since it uses processes sensory information to weigh up the options, etc, it "experiences" the colors, etc."

I'm glad you put quotation marks around 'experience' since this tells me you respect that the experience a brain has is only a metaphorical or figurative on, not the experience we have.

"Basically the working memory part is what "we" are conscious of."

This leap, however, needs to be explained. I can massage a pillow all day, and we can say the pillow is "experiencing" my massaging. However, in no way should this imply that the pillow is actually experiencing anything.

"BTW, maybe this article will help explain things a bit. Part of its title reads "Experience is not something we feel but something we do"."

Naturally I don't understand this, since both feeling and doing are experiences. Behavior, on the other hand, is not. Plants and animals behave in certain ways, but this is not considered to be a form of experience (except in a metaphorical sense).

"So basically the working memory *does* things, like use problem-solving patterns from long-term memory to work out what future action to take."

This sounds like behavior to me (or in computer jargon, processing).

"A brain has its own beliefs/expectations, goals, problem-solving strategies, sensory data, etc. Anyway, to be capable of expressing a first-person account, the brain needs to summarize its "train of thought" - probably using language."

I would object to the brain having beliefs, etc. except in some metaphorical use, but assuming this, you seem to think that a first person account amounts to a summarization of its activity. These ideas have been put forward by other thinkers, as well. For example, some thinkers have thought that information processing in our neural network requires severe culling of data to pick out only the relevant features of the world, and it is only what is (highly) relevant that surfaces in conscious experience. While all this may be true, it doesn't explain conscious experience, nor why it is needed.

"And this becomes sensory data for itself (it can detect its own commentary - the "voice in its head")."

There may be something to this (though why it should be so designed remains a mystery). Let's say I hooked a TV camera and receiver to a computer and projected what it sensed to a monitor where it became "sensory data" to some or another process that processed it. What purpose would there be in that? Why not take the original data and process it straight away? More significantly, however, it is not clear to me how conscious experience could be a projection of any sort in such a way that it could provide sensory input to another part of the brain.

"The brain is generating that commentary and that brain forms explicit beliefs that it is continuously generating thoughts and solving problems."

The brain may be involved in producing mental activity. This is not a position that I would argue against. What I would need is an account of what it is producing in producing that activity. What is an explicit belief?

"No I haven't read any of their books. Maybe I'm a functionalist... I don't know. I'm just rattling off here."

What would you say is the function of consciousness?

"The brain would be forced to take action to avoid the pain signal, based on its intensity."

This is a distortion of language. The brain may be involved in our taking action and our avoidance of pain, based on its intensity, and we might be able to discover the extent of the involvement and the details of its activities in that involvement. But to say that the brain takes action or the brain avoids the pain signal is ridiculous (unless I'm to assume your taking a poetic license).


"It experiences this process of avoidance."

Again, this can only be understood in a metaphorical sense, not in any literal sense.

"My main theory is that "we" are the part of the brain that compares all the emotional signals together and works out what to do, relying on learnt problem-solving strategies."

Good luck with this.

"No I'm saying that if you seek/repeat something, it is *pleasure*, even if you are seeking the *former* pain signal. (Assuming that this compulsion was"

In that case mental activity does not correspond to a neural configuration (a particular wiring) of the brain. Rather mental activity is based on whether or not the brain "seeks" or "avoid" something. How do you detect whether the brain is seeking or is avoiding something? What activity in the brain corresponds to seeking and what activity in the brain corresponds to avoiding?

"I think it would be less confusing for me if you just pointed to something and said "that thing over there" rather than give it a name."

Ah, but the same problem occurs. I have to understand that pointing means what it is you claim it does, just as much as does a verbal utterance. I used the example of the moon because it seemed uncontroversially to be something that most everyone on the planet thinks exists independently of us and regardless of the name we give it and where in the sky it is located, it would be the very same moon each of us refers to.

"I hadn't been clear that you're talking about the thing that the phrase "the moon" refers to rather than the words "the moon". It is just that there can be many levels to statements - if you're talking about philosophy."

Well, yes, philosophy is about difficult topics and the reason why the question made you uncomfortable is that the existence of the moon seems to be quite different than the existence of the fundamental particles it is composed of, principally because it is alleged that there is so much space between these particles that we ought to be able to see right through them (photons being even incredibly smaller). But I digress. Philosophical questions are supposed to make us uncomfortable. Philosophers are those who take up the challenge and try to make sense of what it is that makes us uncomfortable.

""Actually I think about .2 seconds is involved seeing something and .2 seconds is involved making a binary or more complex decision. So it takes about .4 seconds if you need to choose between two options (e.g. press on button or another depending on the visual stimuli) and about .2 if you only have one button to press. I haven't got an applet to show that at the moment though."

I think you have a faulty model. The intrinsic problem is its linearity, but mainly it doesn't accommodate what seeing actually is. I suggest reading Tor Norretrander's "The User Illusion" in order to bring you closer to current research on the relationship between consciousness and brain activity.

owleye

John Page

owleye:
I don't find the existence of shared concepts between non-identical physical states so difficult. It is possible for the same functional computation performed in many different ways (by computers, by humans, logic, math etc.) As to a specific example, how about all the different type faces with the letter "a" in the computer in front of you. They all represent the same thing but their form differs.

I respectfully suggest that a shared concept does not require an identical physical brain state. That we have common physiology makes a) experiences easier to relate and b) allows us to compare thought process since the "modis operandi" of our brains is similar. Do you agree?
To your last question, clearly this depends on the robot. Most robots have very different physiology than humans.
I don't see the difficulty with a third person account in the traditional sense of an independent witness. I gave the expample to refer to a shared first person account so I don't think we disagree much there. The issue is the extent to which everybody is alike/different and to correlate this to how they experience life (by understanding in detail how those experiences are generated within the mind/body and eventually experienced consciously etc.
To avoid ambiguity between thought (as a generalized process), a thought (as a process concerning some object, perhaps, say, "The weather is nice today") and an instance of a thought is when a specific thought occurs (i.e. somebody actually thinks "The weather is nice today").
What else do you think there is to the actual thought than brain activity? I would say "XYZ" is the instance of the thought in question.
I'm not sure the question is meaningful - if you have a perfect copy of a person then its identical right down to the last subejctive details and physcial atom... in any event brain activity occurs wrt external reality so I'm not sure I can answer anyway. Back to the link I gave you on color experience - did you follow it to the part that talked about some optical pathways not being able to transmit more than one color at a time (blue + yellow is what I remember as mutually exclusive per pathway)?

Anyway, I'm not going to pretend I can give you a precise description of how shared experiences can and cannot occur because I don't have one. On the other hand, it can be demonstrated that light perception in normal brains happens in a similar way, thus explaining how we can share a common experience of "blue".
?? Just give me description of something you have determined without defining it.
First, I have provided you examples of conflicting meanings specifcally related to your usage in criticisms of my observations.
Second, you make an unsubstantiated allegation.
Third, as to the function of language and meaning of words in relation to reality, all words are adjectives see link to <a href="http://www.reconciliationism.org/language.htm" target="_blank">Language and Music</a>.
I look forward to your response.
You were saying inconsistent things, do I need any other reason?
C'mon owlie, I suggest better qualifying your questions and comments! My thread title made no distinction between conscious and non-conscious perception. Did you take a look at the blindsight thread - things can be perceieved that we are sometimes consciously aware of and sometimes not, the thread gives a link to evidence of this in "normal" brains as well as "split" brains.
Nearly a tautology but not quite. One may seek something without consciously knowing what that something is.
You might be right, let's quit the rhetoric and get to the issues.

Cheers, John

PS Lot's of typos, sorry

[ July 15, 2002: Message edited by: John Page ]</p>

John Page

Because you specified that "picking out" actually triggered the perception. Here's what you wrote ......Notwithstanding this, I suspect there has to be some features of the actual object that are picked out which would trigger the perception in the first place, even if it is a wrong perception. I therefore sought clarification merely by stating my view.
Please go look at the first link in the Blindsight thread - these are experiments on "normal" people proving that blindsight phenomena can be shown in them. i.e. subconscious (or non-conscious) perception does exist. Do you have empirical realist or scientific evidence to the contrary?
How do you jump to this conclusion from what I have said? Are you saying there is no empirical space/time evidence for consciousness?
So do philosophy and religion - what's your point? Because if you can't tell the difference between things there's nothing to perceive, reality would just appear as "white noise". Do you have an alternative theory as to how perception occurs?
No, a concept is represented within a brain state.
Please see earlier in this post. I'm not sure how else to express this to you but form and function can be separated. Flash cards (and yes, of couse the model could be flawed). Try flashing cards of something unfamiliar to the subject - like letters to one year olds.
The concepts are acquired by the learning process in humans. You might call structured learning courses programming. You might cll acquisitive learning self-programming.
No, assumption. Truth is a construction of the brain/mind. No I'm not an anti-realist because I hold that the brain/mind is real. I didn't say all logic, math etc could be derived from the law of identity!
Just to be clear, I didn't propose that mathematical laws are physical laws, only that they stem from the realtionship between our minds and physical reality. If there were no similar instances of things in reality then math would not work because there's nothing to count!
The law of identity is a statement, an axiom. It could be disproved by finding two things that were identical. Nobody has done this yet and it would seem an impossible task without finding a breach in the physics of the space/time continuum. The contradiction is not in the law of identity (to which I subscribe) but in the way our minds hold such propositions that A = A. Ironically, it seems we need to assume that two things can be proven identical in order to create the systems of both math and logic. I will send you a paper on this.
In your example you are using the calculator as a tool to externalize a mental process. The logic is something you perceive, the calculator is merely a mechanism.
The timeless quality you refer to is an illusion borne upon a repeatable process with predictable results. When you turn the calcultor off, it no longer shows you the results of the addition, however if you invoke a repeat instance of the same (logical) operation you get the same result. Its not the 2 + 2 continuously equals 4 in some great adding machine in the sky, but that 2 + 2, when performed according to certain rules of addition, always results in the quantity 4.
All I'm doing is asking you for an example of something that is concrete but not physical because I don't know what you mean by concrete.
Coherent response to what? Nitpicking about definitions? Answers to questions that I freely admit I don't have? Where are the contradictions? I think I've offered substantiation of all the key statements I've made. Have you provided any actual evidence to support your empirical realism? If you hadn't noticed what I'm looking for is a sensible definition of the mind/body border in order to test and refine my thoughts, I'm not claiming to have all the answers.
Why, because you don't want to defend a theory of timeless ideals? I'm trying to find out what position you are suggesting we might debate as an alternative to my suggestions. How can I be expected to argue the toss if you refuse to respond?
Nor was it intended to, I was simply explaining why what I proposed remained consistent without any need to resort to ideals.
Thank you, nor I. BTW I'm not looking to trash other theories, I'm trying to jigsaw together something that is reasonably consistent across disciplines.
Getting closer. There is only one reality. The likeness of reality that exists inside a mind/brain is a part of reality. Within a mind/brain there exists an informational representation of reality - while the actual data comprising such representation is real (physically within the mind/brain) the "reality" percieved on the basis of that data is an abstract of reality (and not necessarily a completely accurate one).
First, I wish I had a certain method for achieving objectivity. I would categorize belief as being unsubstantiated with existential evidence, or imaginary (I think of empirical evidence as including heresay, but this may be wrong). Knowledge can be achieved through existential substantiation in a number of ways ranging from direct personal observation uing one or more senses through to repeated observations and third party corroboration etc. This is the way I think of it because I haven't been able to find a description elsewhere that I'm happy with.
We'd need to start with what you think you are seeing and make records of that experience (PET, video etc.) After a long time I hope we could figure out how you perceive what you perceive right down to interpreting the legends on the keycaps and picture on the screen. In this way I would be able to tell you what you are seeing all the way through the "seeing" process from the cornea to wherever the seat of conscious perception was at the time.
It's not mine, it wasn't a philosophy of history - I probably don't have one worth subscribing to, all I was doing was quoting some stuff that I had learned about how historians approach the process of categorizing knowledge and yes its fraught wth a myriad of problems.

Cheers, John

[ July 15, 2002: Message edited by: John Page ]</p>

owleye

DRFseven....

"Cognition seems to involve a continuous looping process where multiple systems are coupled in a dynamic way - there is a continuous crossing back and forth between environment, body, and mind."

The intent of the question was supposed to get you to recognize the long-standing philosophical problem of how a mental act (in this case of cognition) could affect a physical act (or vice-versa). The reason that this is a difficult problem is that mental activity does not seem to involve matter in motion, unlike physical activity. So the answer you gave above would beg the further question of how it "crosses back and forth between mind and body."

"Why do you go to the store and buy the, now famous, Chex Mix? What complex interactions took place? Your lucid thought was something like "I think I'll go get Chex Mix now.", and you might even "go back a step" and reflect that you saw an ad about Chex Mix that stimulated your appetite, or that you skipped lunch and some biological signaling was likely going on. But unless your attention is drawn to it, you are probably not going to picture your "behaving brain" as it would look being imaged while this process of thinking about getting Chex Mix was going on. You wouldn't realize that thousands of neural transactions were being made that involved habits, associations, weights and motivation in a series of complex inter-level actions between sensory processes, internal and external stimuli, memory, and neural modification."

I can readily understand the physical (even neuronal) activity that must precede the behavior. I believe neurophysiologists have identified what is called the center which supplies the readiness potential located in the cerebral cortex that activates the series of previously learned muscle actions that coordinate the physical activity that constitutes the behavior in question. Once this readiness potential arises, the behavior is likely to be produced (though I understand that it can be checked, giving rise to the notion that we have some sort of free will over the actions we take). This, however, doesn't explain how mental activity (associated with consciousness) is involved, nor why it is needed.

"Conscious thoughts, which are stimulated by both internal and external events (conscious and unconscious thoughts, as well as incoming environmental signals), go on to, themselves, stimulate other conscious and unconscious thoughts."

This is of course what needs explaining.

What is the relationship between the mental and the physical that drives your thinking?

owleye

DRFseven

Hello, John. I'm curious as to whether you (or anyone!) agree with the idea that the body is to the mind as the person is to "jogging." There is a lot more going on with the person than just the jogging, and when the person stops jogging, the jogging no longer exists. However, there is definitely a thing known as jogging, and when he is engaged in it, jogging seems to exist. He can alter his gait and the description of his activity may no longer clearly be jogging.

What happens to that mind/body border in cases where mind is not presented in the way to which we are accustomed to seeing it? Why does Ahlzheimer's seem to rob people of "themselves?" Why do people with autism seem to lack that theory of mind that is present in others who exhibit mental retardation in the absence of autism (as in Down's Syndrome)?

owleye

John....

"I don't find the existence of shared concepts between non-identical physical states so difficult. It is possible for the same functional computation performed in many different ways (by computers, by humans, logic, math etc.) As to a specific example, how about all the different type faces with the letter "a" in the computer in front of you. They all represent the same thing but their form differs."

This only restates the problem I had been inquiring about. Given our concept of 'a' (its type) we can recognize tokens of that concept through our senses. The question is what do you look for in neuronal activity that corresponds to the concept of 'a', its type, and not the token by which it is recognized. This is the hard problem. (I gather you think certain brain activity looks like or sounds like an 'a', something I would find very odd.)

"To your last question, clearly this depends on the robot. Most robots have very different physiology than humans."

What is the relationship between physiology and conscious experience such that I can determine how the robot experiences things -- i.e., such that we might be able to share experiences. (I gather you have answered this by suggesting that a copy of that experience is contained in both the robot and us.)

"I don't see the difficulty with a third person account in the traditional sense of an independent witness. I gave the expample to refer to a shared first person account so I don't think we disagree much there. The issue is the extent to which everybody is alike/different and to correlate this to how they experience life (by understanding in detail how those experiences are generated within the mind/body and eventually experienced consciously etc."

I think the reason you don't believe it is a difficult problem is that you don't have an appreciation of the philosophical problem that consciousness presents. That problem has been with us for millenia. I can appreciate your scientific optimism here, but until I can see a major difference between your account of a pillow and your account of a neural network, I think you are only fooling yourself if you think you are on the right track.

"What else do you think there is to the actual thought than brain activity? I would say "XYZ" is the instance of the thought in question."

Since this is the question before us, how would you characterize "XYZ" in a general way such that I could determine from it the instance of the thought it is supposed to be? You have claimed that at some future date we will be able to read a person's thoughts from such a characterization. I am not convinced that you appreciate the difficulty of this. I may be able to read a person's mind from their behavior (their "body language") but this is a far cry from seeing brain activity and making the same correlation. The biggest mistake I believe is in your thinking that the brain contains tokens of mental concepts which are supposed to represent those concepts.

"I'm not sure the question is meaningful."

This sounds like a good answer. It may not be meaningful to speak of shared experiences apart from the language we use to communicate it. Of course one needs a theory of meaning (and a meaning theory, if one distinguishes these two) in order to make this determination.

"Anyway, I'm not going to pretend I can give you a precise description of how shared experiences can and cannot occur because I don't have one. On the other hand, it can be demonstrated that light perception in normal brains happens in a similar way, thus explaining how we can share a common experience of "blue"."

The reason for the questioning has to do with your particular orientation toward the actual subjective experiences we have, whether they are meaningful in a private sense, independent of whether they are meaningful in a public sense. I gather for you they are not meaningful. This would undoubtedly imply that when a robot uses 'blue' in the same way we do, we can assume it experiences this color in the same way, and, even if it didn't, it wouldn't matter. This "Turing test" meaning is one way out of the problem, though of course not everyone would be happy with it.

"Just give me description of something you have determined without defining it."

This dress is blue with white polkadots, ruffled, like taffeta, and sways loosely when worn. It is sized to fit most 20-something women. .....

I have described the dress without defining it.

"I look forward to your response."

I'm not going to oblige until I can sense you recognize the difficulty.

"You were saying inconsistent things, do I need any other reason?"

And your noticing inconsistencies implied that my thinking was muddled and that you, by contrast, had clarity of vision because you could see them whereas I couldn't.

"C'mon owlie, I suggest better qualifying your questions and comments! My thread title made no distinction between conscious and non-conscious perception."

I know. In my mind, perception requires consciousness. This is not the case for you, however, and I realized this only lately, causing me to recognize how much time I've wasted.

"Did you take a look at the blindsight thread - things can be perceieved that we are sometimes consciously aware of and sometimes not, the thread gives a link to evidence of this in "normal" brains as well as "split" brains."

This is your interpretation of perception. It is not mine. I'd call it something else if consciousness was not involved. However, to communicate with you, I will now try to refer my philosophical concerns to the category of perception you take to be conscious perception and I would hope you would address them in that light.

"Nearly a tautology but not quite. One may seek something without consciously knowing what that something is."

I think you are inappropriately assuming that when I indicated that a concept was required prior to recognizing objects of the class associated with that concept, I meant that the concept was explicitly known. Indeed, I would say quite the opposite. The concept is largely hidden from us and only with difficulty do we extract it. Definitions, found in dictionaries, may represent an approximation of our best effort at determining what it consists of. In the same way, we may not explicitly know what we are seeking, but we will recognize it when we have found it. Because of this, I think the idea of physicalizing a concept will be a far larger problem than you have taken it to be.

owleye

owleye

John....

"Because you specified that "picking out" actually triggered the perception. Here's what you wrote ......Notwithstanding this, I suspect there has to be some features of the actual object that are picked out which would trigger the perception in the first place, even if it is a wrong perception. I therefore sought clarification merely by stating my view."

Ok. I guess there is some ambiguity in what I wrote. However, because it would require me to explain observations as part of a larger theory of mine, I don't think it worth going into.

"Please go look at the first link in the Blindsight thread - these are experiments on "normal" people proving that blindsight phenomena can be shown in them. i.e. subconscious (or non-conscious) perception does exist. Do you have empirical realist or scientific evidence to the contrary?"

Again, your calling it 'perception' is what I would object to, not the experiments. However, as I also indicated, because this is not how you use the term, I will try to amend the language of my concerns to be about conscious perception, as you would understand it.

"How do you jump to this conclusion from what I have said? Are you saying there is no empirical space/time evidence for consciousness?"

Yes.

"Because if you can't tell the difference between things there's nothing to perceive, reality would just appear as "white noise". Do you have an alternative theory as to how perception occurs?"

The comparison that is the subject of the question is comparing objects to brain activity, not comparing objects with each other. What makes you think that the brain compares certain of its own activity with what it finds in the world.

"No, a concept is represented within a brain state."

Where is the concept then that is being represented within a brain state?

"Flash cards (and yes, of couse the model could be flawed). Try flashing cards of something unfamiliar to the subject - like letters to one year olds."

I assume you have done this. I haven't actually, and i don't have any one year olds around to try this on. Perhaps you could tell me what you think has happened in experiments with "flash cards"? What theory is confirmed by these results that would prohibit other theories from being confirmed by it?

"The concepts are acquired by the learning process in humans. You might call structured learning courses programming. You might cll acquisitive learning self-programming."

Well, yes, but this helps me only if I know what your theory of learning is. Behaviorists think we learn through conditioning of various sorts. Are you a behaviorist?

"No, assumption. Truth is a construction of the brain/mind. No I'm not an anti-realist because I hold that the brain/mind is real. I didn't say all logic, math etc could be derived from the law of identity!"

I think it is a mis-use of the term 'assumption' but I shouldn't be surprised at this. You have consistently misused important terms in the description of your thesis. I'll no longer try to bring in philosophical references since it appears that I cannot depend on your learning about them from my meager attempts. Philosophy is not your bag, I can tell.

"Just to be clear, I didn't propose that mathematical laws are physical laws, only that they stem from the realtionship between our minds and physical reality. If there were no similar instances of things in reality then math would not work because there's nothing to count!"

Mathematicians, as you may know, do not spend their time dealing with the real world. They are off in their own world trying to prove whether some theorem is true or not, given certain axioms and definitions they are adhering to. From your standpoint, their mathematical truth depends on the truth of the axioms. Despite this, mathematicians are not concerned with the truth of their axioms and definitions. This is merely a given to them. What is needed by your physicalized theory of the mind is a way of characterizing the truth of the mathematician and logician (what is sometimes called formal truth) as mental activity in physical terms.

"The law of identity is a statement, an axiom. It could be disproved by finding two things that were identical."

Supposedly all electrons that have the same mass, charge and spin, are identical. What makes you think otherwise?

"Nobody has done this yet and it would seem an impossible task without finding a breach in the physics of the space/time continuum."

What do you mean by 'identical' such that it seems an impossible task to find two identical things unless there is a breach in the physics of the spacetime continuum?

"The contradiction is not in the law of identity (to which I subscribe) but in the way our minds hold such propositions that A = A. Ironically, it seems we need to assume that two things can be proven identical in order to create the systems of both math and logic."

How does our mind hold the proposition A = A? What do you mean by "prove" when it comes to proving identity?

"In your example you are using the calculator as a tool to externalize a mental process. The logic is something you perceive, the calculator is merely a mechanism.
The timeless quality you refer to is an illusion borne upon a repeatable process with predictable results."

What repeatable process could produce a different value for the results of an addition such that the new results would not be thought of as erroneous? It would seem this could not be a physical process, since I would believe any different result would be erroneous. Indeed, if I added two numbers together which resulted in a different value than what I believe to be the right answer, I would attribute it to a faulty calculation on my part. Your speaking about this as an illusion doesn't seem to characterize why I think I've made an error.

"When you turn the calcultor off, it no longer shows you the results of the addition, however if you invoke a repeat instance of the same (logical) operation you get the same result. Its not the 2 + 2 continuously equals 4 in some great adding machine in the sky, but that 2 + 2, when performed according to certain rules of addition, always results in the quantity 4."

That's what our minds do. It is the mathematical certainty of the results that you have to account for in your theory. Mere repetition of some process doesn't seem to characterize it. Prior to Godel having proved his famous theorem, it was an open question. Once he proved it, most of the younger mathematicians accepted it right away. Over the next year, every mathematican accepted it. Mathematicians, having accepted it, accept it in a timeless sense, not a provisional sense. When it was an open question, its status was not known. However, that it was not known did not mean that it did not have a status. All it meant was that no mind had figured it out.

"All I'm doing is asking you for an example of something that is concrete but not physical because I don't know what you mean by concrete."

I'm no longer interested in accomodating you on this. The dictionary's example of a concrete idea was apparently inadequate for you. I don't think I'm up to being better than the dictionary.

""Why, because you don't want to defend a theory of timeless ideals?"

I'm not interested in promoting or defending my ideas.

"I'm trying to find out what position you are suggesting we might debate as an alternative to my suggestions. How can I be expected to argue the toss if you refuse to respond?"

If you had any philosophical interest in these subjects you have long ago developed your ideas within a context of known ideas about the subject. You should know that others have come before you and addressed the same questions you have. I am not going to do the research for you.

"Getting closer. There is only one reality. The likeness of reality that exists inside a mind/brain is a part of reality. Within a mind/brain there exists an informational representation of reality - while the actual data comprising such representation is real (physically within the mind/brain) the "reality" percieved on the basis of that data is an abstract of reality (and not necessarily a completely accurate one)."

This seems to imply to me that what I've been referring to as the hard problem of consciousness is eliminated through a physicalization of it. However, you haven't provided a physicalization of consciousness, except through the use of the term 'abstract' which, in your use, hasn't been adequately described, and in any case, fails to represent how consciousness deals with abstractions. Moreover, though it may be that there is some physicalization of concepts that abstraction from reality makes possible, such a physicalization seems only to represent a concept, and not is a concept, thus making me wonder whether or not you have physicalized it.

"First, I wish I had a certain method for achieving objectivity. I would categorize belief as being unsubstantiated with existential evidence, or imaginary (I think of empirical evidence as including heresay, but this may be wrong). Knowledge can be achieved through existential substantiation in a number of ways ranging from direct personal observation uing one or more senses through to repeated observations and third party corroboration etc. This is the way I think of it because I haven't been able to find a description elsewhere that I'm happy with."

Well, of course, I really didn't expect you to have a good theory of knowledge, since philosophy is not your bag, but what I'm more interested in is where at times you seem to suggest a correspondence theory of truth ("truth correlates external reality with some internal state") whereas at other times you seems to have a coherence theory of truth ("truth is constructed"). There are other times in which I think you have a pragmatic theory of truth -- "that which is agreed upon" -- because of your call for my agreement on one or another point you wish to make.

"We'd need to start with what you think you are seeing and make records of that experience (PET, video etc.) After a long time I hope we could figure out how you perceive what you perceive right down to interpreting the legends on the keycaps and picture on the screen. In this way I would be able to tell you what you are seeing all the way through the "seeing" process from the cornea to wherever the seat of conscious perception was at the time. "

Actually this is possible merely through eye and head tracking apparatuses. That wasn't the question, however. What I was looking for is not the physical object being referred to in perception, but the experienced object -- that which I'm consciously attending to -- which you seem to think is different than the physical object. (I assume I can consciously attend to this object without the object actually being present. Recall the example I gave of seeing the coiled rope as a snake.)

owleye

John Page

owleye:

I've run out of time tonight and wasn;t able to give your post a thorough response. I would like to respond to the above, though.

I don't see the correspondence and coherence explanations as being contradictory - I think them complementary in that a truth is a state constructed within a mind (by mental processes). This is like saying there is a brick and a process by which the brick is arrived at.

As to the pragmatic truth theory you reference, consider the intersubjective "truth making process" across a number of minds it seems communication allows us to negotiate and agree on common truths. Indeed, I hope that this is the process we are engaged in in this thread.

I hope this makes my theory of (truth) knowledge a little clearer.

Cheers, John