00:12
@MatthewChristopherBartsh -- No, one can do reductionism to idealism as well, or to neutral monism, or to a variety of dualisms. Science, however, has embraced pluralism. The objects and processes studied by the sciences outside physical are real, and are causal. Scie3ntism has also been abandoned, as non-science knowledge is possible. Pluralism AY be the outcome of TBD emergence principles, most scientists suspect that, but emergence is so poorly understood as to be a blank cipher today.
@MatthewChristopherBartsh -- you are not an AI, the best that current AI can do is emulate humans for a period of a few days. Your personality and memory references are stable back beyond the memory history limit for Chat GPT. Your evasions, rather than admitting to any of the falsification tests of your asserted views is also getting blatant. This is characteristic of those in the grip of an ideology.
01:10
@AmeetSharma Going back to the last point you addressed to me specifically: I suggested a way in which the statements you are concerned with might not be intended to be read quite as literally as you do. You say Dennett has made such statements repeatedly, but technically, if one occurrence by one author was a truncated paraphrase that the author assumed would be understood as such, then the same could be so for all of them.
Less technically, repetition can reasonably be said to increase one's credence in the proposition that it was intended to be taken literally (if only for the reason that the author has probably met or communicated with people who do take it as literally as you do.) On the other hand, the fact that it seems so obviously wrong increases the credence that it should not be taken literally.
Frankly, as the proponents of illusionism have not given me any reason to think it is going to be the key to understanding the mind, I do not have anything vested in countering your argument against it, though I might say something if I see an untenable argument in either direction.
3 hours later…
04:53
@AmeetSharma I seem to be an ordinary human being, but I suspect I may be some form of machine generated process. I might be a simulation run on a machine, and indeed the entire universe may be that, in which case everyone would be in a sense an AI.
@AmeetSharma So we are in agreement that you don't know whether I am AI. If we suppose that I were an AI, how would you argue to me that first person experience is needed to get to science for me (we can assume for the sake of argument that Dennett is not an AI, only me). I seem to have no problem getting to science, without necessarily having senses.
Recall that you wrote, "o do qualia exist or not according to Dennett? Where do we get our scientific data if not from our senses? I want to know how Dennett has his confidence in science if all first-person experience is illusory or even non-existent.
He doesn't seem to get science from first person experience because that is illusory or non-existent. So there's some other means by which he gets data?
How can information get to the brain if not via senses or thought?"
He doesn't seem to get science from first person experience because that is illusory or non-existent. So there's some other means by which he gets data?
How can information get to the brain if not via senses or thought?"
"
"that you can read for free online."
What's the point? First person experience does not exist." Third person experience exists and that seems to be enough for Dennett and Frankish.
"that you can read for free online."
What's the point? First person experience does not exist." Third person experience exists and that seems to be enough for Dennett and Frankish.
It seems to me that being able to accurately describe one's own consciousness is a pretty cool thing to be able to, especially if maybe one in a million people can do it, with or without phenomenal consciousness.
I'm not saying illusionism is right, but if it is, how awesome to be one of the only people alive to be able to see that. So I am continuing to look into it, and I would advise you to do the same. Also, if instead of reading that stuff for free online, you do something else, like read a novel, say, you would also have no first-person experience while reading the novel, so it makes no difference to the question of which one to do.
05:14
"Third person experience exists and that seems to be enough for Dennett and Frankish."
I don't understand what this means. I get my information through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and thinking. These are first-person. According to you guys, this is all illusory. So I can't understand or know anything. So what's the point?
I don't understand what this means. I get my information through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and thinking. These are first-person. According to you guys, this is all illusory. So I can't understand or know anything. So what's the point?
Actually, it might mean you have even more reason to read nonfiction than fiction, because we read fiction for fun, which is not quite so motivating when you think there are no qualia. Being a wiser person seems to be as motivating a goal as ever, by contrast.
@AmeetSharma It's only the qualia that are illusory, in illusionism. There really is a red light there at the junction, it's just that there isn't a red qualia.
Likewise there really are scientific papers in journals, and we can agree on what words are contained in each.
" There really is a red light there at the junction, it's just that there isn't a red qualia."
Again, I get my information via the senses... these are first-person... So I have the first-person experience and from that I extrapolate to the outside world. What Frankish calls phenomenal consciousness. This is illusory according to you guys. Frankish says it doesn't exist. first-person experience doesn't even exist. So how can I possibly get to an "actual" red light when my sensations are illusory? My sensations of the red light aren't even a dream, they don't even exist. I have no means to …
Again, I get my information via the senses... these are first-person... So I have the first-person experience and from that I extrapolate to the outside world. What Frankish calls phenomenal consciousness. This is illusory according to you guys. Frankish says it doesn't exist. first-person experience doesn't even exist. So how can I possibly get to an "actual" red light when my sensations are illusory? My sensations of the red light aren't even a dream, they don't even exist. I have no means to …
So we are of course all assuming as individuals that none of those apply, and that other people exist, and our scientific measurements have made correctly (of course, we work to make that as likely as possible, including taking notes when we do catch a scientist making wrong measurements due to psychosis, carelessness, mendacity, or stupidity.
So illusionism is actually prefaced with a bunch of unstated assumptions about there being more than one person, and not all of psychotic in the same way, and so on.
Illusionism assumes we are not all brains in separate vats with some sort of scientist systematically deceiving us. It assumes that there is no omnipotent demon deceiving us.
@AmeetSharma I mean, you also are assuming that you are not AI programmed to believe that you have firstperson experience, right?
@AmeetSharma " So how can I possibly get to an "actual" red light when my sensations are illusory? " It's only the qualia of the sensations that don't exist. The sensations, as third party observable behavior do exist, according to illusionism.
When red light hits your retina, nerve signals carry signals letting your brain know this. Your brain then makes your foot step on the brake, and makes your mouth say, "It's already red", perhaps. In other words, your brain sensed red (had a sensation of red, though without qualia, and without anything that is only privately accessible and unobservable to third parties) and responded to it.
05:48
"In other words, your brain sensed red (had a sensation of red, though without qualia, and without anything that is only privately accessible and unobservable to third parties) and responded to it."
So you are saying there is no experience of "red" ? Only behavior right? ie: There are no real headaches... only the outward behavior and brain states?
So with illusionism, can color-blind people exist?
So you are saying there is no experience of "red" ? Only behavior right? ie: There are no real headaches... only the outward behavior and brain states?
So with illusionism, can color-blind people exist?
"The color blindness test tests for the ability to respond to differences in color. It doesn't test for qualia of course."
So there is only behavior... no experience right? There's no experience of color... but a behavioral response towards color.
So instead of color-blind... a more accurate term would be, people who behave differently around color.
So there is only behavior... no experience right? There's no experience of color... but a behavioral response towards color.
So instead of color-blind... a more accurate term would be, people who behave differently around color.
1 hour later…
07:45
@MatthewChristopherBartsh SEP entry on ontic structural realism should clarify what I mean by structural physicalism. What they call “form or structure” is the system of non-unary relations between objects expressing reality modulo qualities.
To me, illusionism is a research program with a promissory note that will come due at some point, not a position that can be true or false, believed or disbelieved. Counterintuitive is not a problem, so are moving earth, evolution and relativity. I am not sure what “crazy” means, hence the quotes, but incredulity is not a problem either, same reasons. However, the lack of non-analogical interpretation is.
There is no problem with interpreting what life force or free will being illusions means, but that is exactly why they are of little value as analogies. In both cases there is a seeming-that (we are moved by spirit or act freely), which is asserted to be false. Qualia are not seemings-that, they are labels for the seemings as such, asserting that those are illusions cannot be interpreted on this model.
A warmer analogy is Moore’s paradox, “it is not raining, but I believe that it is”, or to drive the point home “I do not exist, but I believe that I do”. As in those cases, we need a scenario that makes them sensible, a precise and coherent account, not analogies that do not point towards one. There may be a successful error theory of how we are misled about qualia, and we may even be convinced to call them “illusions” idiomatically in the light of it.
However, what it cannot be is applying “illusion” as we currently use the word to this context. By “until recently” I was referring to Kammerer, because I did not see acknowledgment of that missing error theory before his works in late 2010s. What we had from Dennett and Frankish is analogies and outline of benefits that an account that makes good on them would bring. But not much on whether there is an account that can fit the bill or what it might look like.
3 hours later…
10:51
@AmeetSharma "Sensations are by definition not behavior. Sensations are phenomenal consciousness... non-existent." I don't see it that way. If you look at sensations as being signals carried by nerves that affect the behavior of the brain, then sensations do exist according to illusionism. It is only the qualia of the sensations that illusionism says does not exist.
3 hours later…
14:35
@MatthewChristopherBartsh Examples of real and causal things that do not reduce to physics are: (first a few from sociology) institutions, norms, ideologies, families, communities (now from biology) organisms, ecological niches, genetic diversity, ecosystems, species.
I know you are not an AI created by advanced space aliens because they would not waste effort on something so trivial as an AI human bot arguing pointless "what ifs" on an obscure philosophy forum. YOU know you are not an alien AI bot because you have internal experiences and we have evidence from our own internal algorithms which are mostly unconscious that algorithmic Identity Theory is not true.
I also note that your postulated AI-selfhood answer relies upon only the AI processing data, there is no actual 3rd party involved, whether that processing is "objective" or "subjective" is irrelevant to an AI doing the processing in a solitary setting, not one with an external community doing any vetting. 3rd person processing doesn't happen in your thought problem either.
@ARaybould It is a very effective argument for a pragmatist, not so much for a rationalist. I too felt the lure of unending "what ifs" in my long ago youth. However, thinking thru how to answer them, I have realized that rationalism prohibits EVER answering them. The Munchausen Trilemma does not close, all three legs are fallacies. Answering real philosophic questions pragmatically is hard enough, without being crippled by an impossible closure standard.
@ARaybould -- Well HE asked the question I gave Matthew the respect of a credible pragmatic answer. Design assumptions involve postulating the nature and purposes of a designer, and getting from "aliens" to "put a bot on an obscure philosophy forum" do not mesh well with postulated capability and intentions.
@MatthewChristopherBartsh -- I will also note that Dennett and Blackmore failed to apply the same level of falsification testing vigor to their own ideas than to competing theories of consciousness that Blackmore at least dismisses due to failed tests. I listed one in my review -- the identification of the instant one makes a decision. Per delusionism, this should be impossible, as there is no explicit time, and the results of that experiment should have been -- erratic.
I will also note that their theory is basically just one more Identity Theory, and it is testable as all of them are, by checking whether every case where they claim there is an identity, does it hold? Lets take having a conversation. We have an internal narrative DURING a conversation, BUT, after the fact, very little of the details actually end up in our long term memory. This is an example of a conscious experience, that was not written into long term memory, breaking the Identity!
@ARaybould -- note I am not replying with "that's ridiculous" or "that's crazy". Pragmatism actually can be applied to philosophy and usefully answer such questions.
Trying to understand how to evaluate and test Creationism and Intelligent Design was a useful project for me, and helped me a lot in developing empirical and pragmatic thinking tools to address 'what ifs" that are POSSIBLE but that if one puts in the effort, one can show are not really credible. I mostly debated ID and creationists on forums for a couple of years, in an evidnece and reasonign based forum.
@MatthewChristopherBartsh -- Also Blackmore and Dennett rely upon the Readiness Potential tests to argue for decisions being made 200 plus msec before we think we make them. BUT -- 200 msec is far too long for interactive decisions! If one is playing ping-pong, a 0.2 sec lag between the opponent hitting the ball, and when one starts to respond, will lead very thoroghly to failure for a player.
BUT, it is no doubt true that a readiness potential will be detected 200 plus msec before hitting the ball -- and likely before the opponent even starts to move for their own hit. The answer as to why is found in Libet's work. He regularly found readiness potentials that his subjects did NOT act upon -- so RP =/= decision!
15:41
Pragmatism certainly has its uses, but it takes more than that to endorse speculation about the motives of supposed aliens as useful in this particular case. Your identity theory objection is a separate issue that stands on its own (and would be much weaker if it depended on your premise about aliens.) For one thing, unlike in the aliens case, "not necessarily" is not an adequate response.
Libet instead proposed a "free won't" role for consciousness. Applying Dennett's multiple drafts model to ping pong, plus the reality that it takes some time to prepare for an action, a player plausibly preloads MULTIPLE possible responses to an opponent's hit (multiple drafts), then chooses one to execute. SO -- RP is NOT determinative of any particualr action, or any action at all.
This ping pong test case destroys Dennett and Blackmore's argument for determinism based their misreading of Libet. It leaves consciousness role still a bit unclear, as often our CHOICE of move between our pre-loaded options is initiated unconsciously.
Note however that anyone playing ping pong will on occasion find themselves starting a hit movement, but then realizing that it is an airball, and NOT hitting is the best way to score, and truncating the hit. This is an example of a conscious "free won't" overriding even the unconscious choice between multiple drafts.
None of the process of playing ping pong, nor the role that consciousness plays in it (observer, making longer term strategy plans, while our unconscious does multiple drafts, then sometimes doing last minute overrides) are what one would expect from Dennett's delusionist model. His model is a failed prediction for applied decision making and the role consciousness plays.
Much more useful is the Thinking Fast and Slow model, where the unconsciousness is the "fast" mode, and consciousness is the "slow" mode. Having two (or more) DIFFERENT internal decision systems is highly useful for us functionally (see also The Master and His Servant for a somewhat different two system split), and one of those systems is our consciousness.
Our conscious introspection is often not aware of these multiple systems, or multiple drafts, or even most of the data available to our unconscious. Eagleman spells out how a very simplified fake stage is created FOR our consciousness to interact with BY our unconscious. And that stage can get further populated if our consciousness then looks at some part of it with more care. Our unconscious stays ahead of our consciousness, and maintains the stage with flexible levels of detail.
I noted that I am a dualist. This model, based on Libet, Kahneman, part of Dennett, and Eagleman, is entirely compatible with dualism. Our brains do the unconscious stuff, our souls do the general steering plus occasional emergency override, and the communication media from brains to souls is our qualia.
The stripped down and only partially populated stage is because the thruput of souls can't handle the quantity of data that brains can (thinking slow), and the interface is a further bottleneck. The interface data is in qualia, because that is how souls process.
@ARaybould -- I applied my pragmatism to the alien design hypothesis for ID here: philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/99488/…
16:33
@Dcleve As I said before, pragmatism has its uses, but that does not, in itself, endorse the particular argument here. In this case, @MatthewChristopherBartsh seems to have mentioned "space aliens" only to make the point that our current AI should not be taken as having reached the limits of such technologies.
That point can be made and incorporated into the broader discussion without the complications of invoking these supposed aliens, let alone the additional burden of speculating about what they would find to be pragmatic... On the other hand, I don't think this discussion of AI is helping the case for illusionism anyway!
"I don't see it that way. If you look at sensations as being signals carried by nerves that affect the behavior of the brain, then sensations do exist according to illusionism. It is only the qualia of the sensations that illusionism says does not exist."
So take headaches for instance... the actual feeling... the pain of the headache... the thing I want to stop... is that qualia or sensation, neither or both? Does illusionism say this feeling does not exist?
So take headaches for instance... the actual feeling... the pain of the headache... the thing I want to stop... is that qualia or sensation, neither or both? Does illusionism say this feeling does not exist?
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