Satyavan wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2020 7:06 pm
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2020 1:32 am
I don't disagree with this in principle. Motive is not relevant to a specific argument but it CAN be. I was just noticing that you were potentially biased because of such potential motive. If one is more motivated for defending some other unspoken argument, they tend to appear as advocating FOR some position with trivial supports and denying the 'normal' position.
But if one thinks that the 'normal' position supports a thesis which tells that something pops out of nothing, just by magic, which is the physicalist claim, then I will tend to doubt that 'normality'.
It is inescapable logically. What you are presuming is that an ultimate 'cause' CANNOT derive anything. But this is a digression that moves away from this topic or at least would be a subtopic digression that needs more depth by stepping back to logic and metaphysics.
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2020 1:32 am
You pointed out one case that is news to me and non-representative of the present average.
That is no news. Can't it be that it appears as news because of a biased selection of what is already known?
Tell that to the promoters of those who become famous discussing these topics with more popularity. It IS possible that better 'news' on the topics are being buried by competing interests. But this is irrelevant when we can only deal with what is 'popularly' discussed. This would be a digressiion into media and whether we are getting real of fake news, etc.
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2020 1:32 am
When you assert CLOSURE with certainty as though we all should agree as though it were obvious, it raises a red flag that makes one concerned to require more precision when speaking on the issue.
Did I assert closure? I ask for evidence that the brain is the the cause for phenomenal consciousness.
You denied any other evidence is relevant to the one particular study you selected. Trusting that one study and determining how one can even interpret its validity sufficiently seems too narrow. You asserted its conclusion as a given certanty in a way that seemed that we all agreed and why I said this. I don't mind you differing on opinion. But if we disagree to the 'givens', then we need to first establish other premises we might agree on together first. If you are wanting a type of pretended assumption (as in, "for the sake of argument" type discussion to move on in light of the pretended agreement), you need to clarify this condition so that we aren't assumed to be agreeing to any potential conclusion that might follow upon that pretense.
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2020 1:32 am
As to a perception of something like a particular color, these are illusive ways any mechanism of nature assigns in common by STRUCTURAL factors. But to actually understand that requires even more basic understandings.
Precisely, it needs more than structural factors. What are these?
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2020 1:32 am
Color is NOT the simplest type of sensation. Touch/contact is.
When it comes to the experiential quality of colors or whatever kind of qualia I wonder what determines being one more 'simple' than the other. What means that a feeling of temperature by touch is simpler than seeing redness? I can't even understand what it means in principle.
For ANYTHING in a space that recieves information, it needs SOME type of LINK between the reality out there and the thing we sense. Even if this is some magical message from another place we can't determine, we assume a MEDIUM between everything that informs. As such, the smallest such medium is the immediate contact. So 'touch' as a tangential concept is more simple because you can define it in a binary way: either something touches or it doesn't. Data that would represent this would be like a "0" and "1", or "yes/no" to the question, "is something 'touching' me at such a particular point in space and time?"
Light, on the other hand is much more complex and so would need a bigger 'structure' to express than the simple binary "yes/no" question. So sight is a more complex kind of structure when organized in the brain than touch. That is why I gave the example of the 'structure' of how the Html on this particular site defines a color by using three feilds, one for red, one for blue, and one for green. Then the complexity for each color's intensity defines the two binary numbers in two bits, which is a degree of four levels of brightness.
The structure for color by the Html here, thus expresses an example of why color is more complex of a structure on a logical level than mere touch.
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2020 1:32 am
For this, you should start at how anything receives the minimal inputs and ouputs. Computer Logic is necessary to start from and much of the philosophical discussions are like beginning with Application Logic in order to understand how the hardware operates. By "Application Logic", one can think of using a particular computer program, like a video game, to start from and then try to use that to figure out how computer hardware interprets and operates to make this illusion successful. [Note that color of a computer screen is a 'peripheral' device.
To the underlying computer, it interprets color as a "data structure", such as "color=#000000" means "Black" for the Html on this site. Each two bits for this example defines a mere degree of light that gets through one pixel. It doesn't care what the pixel actually means. The three conventional pixels we use are the red/green/blue pixels for monitors that are standardized. These are arbitrary to the computer but only become apparent as color when that data is combined with the structure of the hardware as well.
And HOW does it become 'apparent' as a conscious experiential quality of color IN US? The above is again the usual magic. It doesn't explain anything when it comes to how subjective qualitative sentience pops into existence. Just a miracle?
When we first become conscious, these initial interpretations of what a color is particulaly is unassigned and becomes so in a way we likely understand at that level and at that time 'consciously'. But we can't remember these events because they DEFINE the structures at that stage to tell us HOW we 'feel' these phenomena and are so absurdly simple, that we cannot notice what they mean NOW looking back. The first time we 'see' we likely don't see color but just data of simplified 'touch' data within the cones in our eyes like the ones' and zeros' of computers. It is HOW this data then gets organized, like how a quadrilateral shape is something with four sides is compared to a triangle with three sides is gets defined neutrally but creates real geometric shapes that we deem independent of our means to interpret the pure logic that defined them as having meaning.
I recommend looking at some entertaining movies on this topic, like "The Matrix" or "The Thirteenth Floor". (I prefer The Thirteenth floor on this as it delves into this to artificial intelligence questions without involving religious interpretations that The Matrix appears to involve.) It helps to understand computer logic too because this question asks whether an apparently 'non-living' thing could ever be conscious like us thinking that it too is 'alive'. How do we tell the difference? Artificial Intelligence in computing attempts to deal with this question and its study will also help us understand better what "consciousness" is.