Qualia

[Rilx]

Not to mention most species have similar brain structures, therefore their qualia would be similar.

Congenitally blind people don't have visual perceptions, they don't see visual "screens" at all. Still they have a 3-dimensional conception of their near locations, necessarily different (in the qualia level) than seeing persons. And their genetic brain structures are as similar as everyone else's; differences are only functional, i.e. learned.

Bad analogy also because computers do not process data in the manner humans do, nor is their screen a source of input, it is an ouput non-vital to their inner operations.

You seem easily say first and think later: in the above sentence you confirmed my viewpoint and refuted your first sentence. Don't mind, we all do it sometimes.

This matter we are arguing about, is one way to express The Hard Problem of Consciousness. You can't use neither conventional (logical) nor intuitive thinking to understand it. Still I believe that by these kind of problems we can develop our thinking to understand phenomena no one has understood ever before.

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

Not to mention most species have similar brain structures, therefore their qualia would be similar.

Congenitally blind people don't have visual perceptions, they don't see visual "screens" at all. Still they have a 3-dimensional conception of their near locations, necessarily different (in the qualia level) than seeing persons. And their genetic brain structures are as similar as everyone else's; differences are only functional, i.e. learned.

Bad analogy also because computers do not process data in the manner humans do, nor is their screen a source of input, it is an ouput non-vital to their inner operations.

You seem easily say first and think later: in the above sentence you confirmed my viewpoint and refuted your first sentence. Don't mind, we all do it sometimes.

This matter we are arguing about, is one way to express The Hard Problem of Consciousness. You can't use neither conventional (logical) nor intuitive thinking to understand it. Still I believe that by these kind of problems we can develop our thinking to understand phenomena no one has understood ever before.

Awful argument really, considering I already addressed it several posts prior. I guess wading through random forum topics is too much for most people. My avatar is very colorful, my posts should be easy to spot.

Cogenitally blind people can dream in visual images, at the very least blobs. Some blind persons say they cannot, but I suspect the screen is there, just unused and underdeveloped, like how a paralyzed person has legs but can't feel them.

My second statement does not verify your theory. You might think it would, but it doesnt. Like I said earlier the screen serves as hub for vital functions of the brain. It is a place of input and output, where as computer screens serve no vital function to the workings of the computer. It would be inneffecient to design a physical screen that did not correlate to physical space, as everything would become a tangled mess that would require constant translation and recalculation for mathematically accuracy.

Even if there was no screen, the brain would translate everything to be mathematically accurate and physically consistent with accepted reality either way. Therefore, such accurately translated reality would be recieved by consciousness, post-process.

[hammock]

I don't think we need to resort to panexperientialism in order to explain the apparent active role of consciousness in the world from a subjective point of view. I think the materialist mistake is to look at consciousness as a single level processing system. Dennett wants to provide us with a materialists explanation so he has to reject the idea of the Cartesian theatre and the "interpreter" or "viewer" of information entering the brain via the senses.

In order to explain consciousness he rejects this idea of a single viewer of information and replaces it with a non-viewer 'multiple- copies' theory. Copies of information from the senses ends up many parts of the brain. In this respect Dennett is correct because the science tells us that consciousness is actually dis-unified, or spread throughout the brain. However, I think materialists will always have a problem accounting for the 'the viewer', the 'experience-er' as a type of raw information smeared across the brain on a singular level. Do various parts of the brain that receive these copies of information also create multiple 'viewers' of these copies?

"Understanders" should replace the notion of "viewers". The head and its optical system, and other specialized tissues the body sports, are already serving as the so-called passive receivers (observers) of environmental energies and these metaphoric "screens". Repeating that first step once again inside the brain is endless Russian-doll country. The next step or agency which is different / less passive is instead the understanding of the acquired sensory data. Which requires breaking it down for study and recruiting stored conceptions to identify the pieces, etc.

This is where multiple levels of processing within the brain provide a better explanation for conscious experience. That is to say, how we can arrive at a situation whereby we have a first person perspective on the world.

Such distributed routines are potentially a better or even necessary explanation for understanding, but not experience in either the introspective [personal] or extrospective [public] divisions. [Cannot be explained by via processes alone, because they lack such qualitative capacities in the world at large so as to avoid the consequence of panexperientialism]. Neither some central set of procedures in the brain, nor a scattered one of competing activities that dissect information / associate it to memory and re-integrate it, offers a sufficient [or non-brute, nonmagical-like] explanation of experience arising. The brain is composed of common elements that engage in their common interactions [is non-special and non-unique in that respect], and their being organized as this larger functional form that regulates microscopic or electrochemical activity doesn't grant that governing structure conjuring powers that exceed the characteristics and limitations of the substrate that physically instantiates it. [Note that this is, again, crouched in adhering to a dogmatic outlook given attention below.]

IOW, even a system or sub-system of processes serving as an Understander is just another material object faced with the problem of how its manipulations of existing entities and their motions and accepted properties could yield visual, aural, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, etc manifestations. When the situation is shackled to any underlying materialist philosophy which forbids matter having intrinsic states (as opposed to the extrinsic ones it gives blessing to). Or put another way: Forbids qualitative events being universally correlated to matter events and arrangements. Or experience having primitive precursors (i.e., classifiable as panexperientialism, protopanexperientialism, etc) for accounting for the emergence of the brain's complex brand of experience. Accordingly, those committed to a dogmatic view of materialism which pre-conditionally excludes such or dislikes such may eventually resort to asserting something along the line of the following: That what even illusions themselves are dependent upon, in order to be "shown", is perversely itself an illusion; the very presence or exhibition itself of both non-illusions and illusions becomes ludicrously deemed to not be the case, in order to protect their traditional conceptions of matter.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, no one thought that there was a mind-body problem. No one thought consciousness was a special mystery and they were right. The sense of difficulty arose only about 400 years ago and for a very specific reason: people began to think they knew what matter was. They thought (very briefly) that matter consisted entirely of grainy particles with various shapes bumping into one another. This was classical contact mechanics, "the corpuscularian philosophy", and it gave rise to a conundrum. If this is all that matter is, how can it be the basis of or give rise to mind or consciousness? It seemed clear, as Shakespeare observed, that "when the brains were out, the man would die". But how could the wholly material brain be the seat of consciousness?

Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness, he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged, so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."

Conclusion: consciousness [experience] can't be physical . . . Hobbes wasn't bothered, though, in 1651. He didn't see why consciousness couldn't be entirely physical. And that, presumably, is because he didn't make the Great Mistake: he didn't think that the corpuscularian philosophy told us the whole truth about the nature of matter. And he was right. Matter is "much odder than we thought", as Auden said in 1939, and it's got even odder since.

. . . "Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic [or that it would have to be magic or brute emergence, etc], "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", [Nicholas] Humphrey and many others [Dennett, etc] make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness [manifestations, qualitative events]. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell [advocating neutral monism] and Whitehead [advocating panexperientialism] in the 1920s.

. . . Humphrey also talks in Dennettian style of "the consciousness illusion" . . . It seems to me, then, that Humphrey's central contentions are hopeless. One doesn't solve the problem of consciousness (such as it is) by saying that consciousness is really a kind of illusion. [Soul Dust by Nicholas Humphrey – The Guardian and Observer books session, Saturday 8 January 2011]

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. . . . Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience". Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other.

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

I don't think we need to resort to panexperientialism in order to explain the apparent active role of consciousness in the world from a subjective point of view. I think the materialist mistake is to look at consciousness as a single level processing system. Dennett wants to provide us with a materialists explanation so he has to reject the idea of the Cartesian theatre and the "interpreter" or "viewer" of information entering the brain via the senses.

In order to explain consciousness he rejects this idea of a single viewer of information and replaces it with a non-viewer 'multiple- copies' theory. Copies of information from the senses ends up many parts of the brain. In this respect Dennett is correct because the science tells us that consciousness is actually dis-unified, or spread throughout the brain. However, I think materialists will always have a problem accounting for the 'the viewer', the 'experience-er' as a type of raw information smeared across the brain on a singular level. Do various parts of the brain that receive these copies of information also create multiple 'viewers' of these copies?

"Understanders" should replace the notion of "viewers". The head and its optical system, and other specialized tissues the body sports, are already serving as the so-called passive receivers (observers) of environmental energies and these metaphoric "screens". Repeating that first step once again inside the brain is endless Russian-doll country. The next step or agency which is different / less passive is instead the understanding of the acquired sensory data. Which requires breaking it down for study and recruiting stored conceptions to identify the pieces, etc.

This is where multiple levels of processing within the brain provide a better explanation for conscious experience. That is to say, how we can arrive at a situation whereby we have a first person perspective on the world.

Such distributed routines are potentially a better or even necessary explanation for understanding, but not experience in either the introspective [personal] or extrospective [public] divisions. [Cannot be explained by via processes alone, because they lack such qualitative capacities in the world at large so as to avoid the consequence of panexperientialism]. Neither some central set of procedures in the brain, nor a scattered one of competing activities that dissect information / associate it to memory and re-integrate it, offers a sufficient [or non-brute, nonmagical-like] explanation of experience arising. The brain is composed of common elements that engage in their common interactions [is non-special and non-unique in that respect], and their being organized as this larger functional form that regulates microscopic or electrochemical activity doesn't grant that governing structure conjuring powers that exceed the characteristics and limitations of the substrate that physically instantiates it. [Note that this is, again, crouched in adhering to a dogmatic outlook given attention below.]

IOW, even a system or sub-system of processes serving as an Understander is just another material object faced with the problem of how its manipulations of existing entities and their motions and accepted properties could yield visual, aural, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, etc manifestations. When the situation is shackled to any underlying materialist philosophy which forbids matter having intrinsic states (as opposed to the extrinsic ones it gives blessing to). Or put another way: Forbids qualitative events being universally correlated to matter events and arrangements. Or experience having primitive precursors (i.e., classifiable as panexperientialism, protopanexperientialism, etc) for accounting for the emergence of the brain's complex brand of experience. Accordingly, those committed to a dogmatic view of materialism which pre-conditionally excludes such or dislikes such may eventually resort to asserting something along the line of the following: That what even illusions themselves are dependent upon, in order to be "shown", is perversely itself an illusion; the very presence or exhibition itself of both non-illusions and illusions becomes ludicrously deemed to not be the case, in order to protect their traditional conceptions of matter.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, no one thought that there was a mind-body problem. No one thought consciousness was a special mystery and they were right. The sense of difficulty arose only about 400 years ago and for a very specific reason: people began to think they knew what matter was. They thought (very briefly) that matter consisted entirely of grainy particles with various shapes bumping into one another. This was classical contact mechanics, "the corpuscularian philosophy", and it gave rise to a conundrum. If this is all that matter is, how can it be the basis of or give rise to mind or consciousness? It seemed clear, as Shakespeare observed, that "when the brains were out, the man would die". But how could the wholly material brain be the seat of consciousness?

Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness, he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged, so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."

Conclusion: consciousness [experience] can't be physical . . . Hobbes wasn't bothered, though, in 1651. He didn't see why consciousness couldn't be entirely physical. And that, presumably, is because he didn't make the Great Mistake: he didn't think that the corpuscularian philosophy told us the whole truth about the nature of matter. And he was right. Matter is "much odder than we thought", as Auden said in 1939, and it's got even odder since.

. . . "Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic [or that it would have to be magic or brute emergence, etc], "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", [Nicholas] Humphrey and many others [Dennett, etc] make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness [manifestations, qualitative events]. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell [advocating neutral monism] and Whitehead [advocating panexperientialism] in the 1920s.

. . . Humphrey also talks in Dennettian style of "the consciousness illusion" . . . It seems to me, then, that Humphrey's central contentions are hopeless. One doesn't solve the problem of consciousness (such as it is) by saying that consciousness is really a kind of illusion. [Soul Dust by Nicholas Humphrey – The Guardian and Observer books session, Saturday 8 January 2011]

One cannot not-exist. Existence exists. What the illusion is the modern delusion of going to work everyday and holding imaginary values, pretending that life has meaning. That's the illusion of consciousness.

[Ginkgo]

It's actually an infinite regress.

There is no screen because there is no one to watch the screen. There is no place in the brain where consciousness is unified. Consciousness is actually dis-unified.

That is your opinion. Your opinion has little to do with reality of the matter. Either there is a screen or there isn't. Your opinion does not change the existence of a screen, just as your opinion does not change the existence of a tree in the forest just because you're aren't there to watch it.

No, it is what the science tells us. The use of the term "screen" indicates a central place within the brain where consciousness takes place. To date no such place has been found. Instead the empirical evidence shows that consciousness can occur in many different places within the brain. Consciousness appears not to be unified.

[thedoc]

Not to mention most species have similar brain structures, therefore their qualia would be similar.

Congenitally blind people don't have visual perceptions, they don't see visual "screens" at all. Still they have a 3-dimensional conception of their near locations, necessarily different (in the qualia level) than seeing persons. And their genetic brain structures are as similar as everyone else's; differences are only functional, i.e. learned.

I saw or read somewhere that congenitally blind people have a more highly developed sense of hearing that they can use as a type of "sonar" to build an image of their environment. There is a story of a blind man who first "Saw" his girlfriend in the rain, due to the echoes bouncing off her body from the rain drops.

[Ginkgo]

"Understanders" should replace the notion of "viewers". The head and its optical system, and other specialized tissues the body sports, are already serving as the so-called passive receivers (observers) of environmental energies and these metaphoric "screens". Repeating that first step once again inside the brain is endless Russian-doll country. The next step or agency which is different / less passive is instead the understanding of the acquired sensory data. Which requires breaking it down for study and recruiting stored conceptions to identify the pieces, etc.

I guess 'understands' still has the problem of requiring an 'understander'. Dennett gets around the problem of an infinite regress in terms of the Cartesian theatre by saying the information received via the senses is distributed throughout the the brain. So it's not so much a infinite regress, but an organizational and distributive ability of the brain when it comes to information. From Dennett's materialist perspective it is not a 'breaking down' for study explanation for consciousness because this would still require 'something' inside the brain to do the understanding.

Overall, I think Dennet's materialist explanation for consciousness fails because when taken to its logical conclusion, his materialist explanation is not reductionist, rather it is an eliminationist theory. In other words, consciousness is just an illusion. If this is true then Dennett's materialist explanation is not a realist theory it is actually anti-realist.

Such distributed routines are potentially a better or even necessary explanation for understanding, but not experience in either the introspective [personal] or extrospective [public] divisions. [Cannot be explained by via processes alone, because they lack such qualitative capacities in the world at large so as to avoid the consequence of panexperientialism].

Perception always has the same problem at a sensory level as far the materialist is concerned. On the other hand, if it is possible to explain how different levels of perception can produce the world from a particular point of view then we can avoid the problem of panexperientialism.

Neither some central set of procedures in the brain, nor a scattered one of competing activities that dissect information / associate it to memory and re-integrate it, offers a sufficient [or non-brute, nonmagical-like] explanation of experience arising. The brain is composed of common elements that engage in their common interactions [is non-special and non-unique in that respect], and their being organized as this larger functional form that regulates microscopic or electrochemical activity doesn't grant that governing structure conjuring powers that exceed the characteristics and limitations of the substrate that physically instantiates it. [Note that this is, again, crouched in adhering to a dogmatic outlook given attention below.]

I would say, 'reintegration' is the key element here. As per my above comment.

IOW, even a system or sub-system of processes serving as an Understander is just another material object faced with the problem of how its manipulations of existing entities and their motions and accepted properties could yield visual, aural, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, etc manifestations. When the situation is shackled to any underlying materialist philosophy which forbids matter having intrinsic states (as opposed to the extrinsic ones it gives blessing to). Or put another way: Forbids qualitative events being universally correlated to matter events and arrangements. Or experience having primitive precursors (i.e., classifiable as panexperientialism, protopanexperientialism, etc) for accounting for the emergence of the brain's complex brand of experience. Accordingly, those committed to a dogmatic view of materialism which pre-conditionally excludes such or dislikes such may eventually resort to asserting something along the line of the following: That what even illusions themselves are dependent upon, in order to be "shown", is perversely itself an illusion; the very presence or exhibition itself of both non-illusions and illusions becomes ludicrously deemed to not be the case, in order to protect their traditional conceptions of matter.

This is why I am suggesting that a physicalist explanation for consciousness is a better alternative.

Strawson quote:
Once upon a time, not so long ago, no one thought that there was a mind-body problem. No one thought consciousness was a special mystery and they were right. The sense of difficulty arose only about 400 years ago and for a very specific reason: people began to think they knew what matter was. They thought (very briefly) that matter consisted entirely of grainy particles with various shapes bumping into one another. This was classical contact mechanics, "the corpuscularian philosophy", and it gave rise to a conundrum. If this is all that matter is, how can it be the basis of or give rise to mind or consciousness? It seemed clear, as Shakespeare observed, that "when the brains were out, the man would die". But how could the wholly material brain be the seat of consciousness?

Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness, he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged, so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."

Conclusion: consciousness [experience] can't be physical . . . Hobbes wasn't bothered, though, in 1651. He didn't see why consciousness couldn't be entirely physical. And that, presumably, is because he didn't make the Great Mistake: he didn't think that the corpuscularian philosophy told us the whole truth about the nature of matter. And he was right. Matter is "much odder than we thought", as Auden said in 1939, and it's got even odder since.

. . . "Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic [or that it would have to be magic or brute emergence, etc], "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", [Nicholas] Humphrey and many others [Dennett, etc] make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness [manifestations, qualitative events]. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell [advocating neutral monism] and Whitehead [advocating panexperientialism] in the 1920s.

. . . Humphrey also talks in Dennettian style of "the consciousness illusion" . . . It seems to me, then, that Humphrey's central contentions are hopeless. One doesn't solve the problem of consciousness (such as it is) by saying that consciousness is really a kind of illusion. [Soul Dust by Nicholas Humphrey – The Guardian and Observer books session, Saturday 8 January 2011]

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. . . . Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience". Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other.

Yes, dualism is still very much alive and well in modern consciousness studies. Perhaps more so than ever. If you are suggesting a type of panpsychism in relation to consciousness then you probably have something in common with David Chalmers.

[Rilx]

Cogenitally blind people can dream in visual images, at the very least blobs. Some blind persons say they cannot, but I suspect the screen is there, just unused and underdeveloped, like how a paralyzed person has legs but can't feel them.

No they can't, because they have no visual memories. Of course they dream, but the "images" contain perceptions from other senses. I believe that seeing persons can't imagine what they are like. No more than we can imagine how bats perceive the world.

Like I said earlier the screen serves as hub for vital functions of the brain. It is a place of input and output, where as computer screens serve no vital function to the workings of the computer. It would be inneffecient to design a physical screen that did not correlate to physical space, as everything would become a tangled mess that would require constant translation and recalculation for mathematically accuracy.

Even if there was no screen, the brain would translate everything to be mathematically accurate and physically consistent with accepted reality either way. Therefore, such accurately translated reality would be recieved by consciousness, post-process.

So you agree that a screen is not necessary, if some other method or principle can unite information into conscious perception about reality?

What about if this accurately translated reality IS NOT RECEIVED by consciousness but the translation itself IS consciousness of the said reality?

[Rilx]

I saw or read somewhere that congenitally blind people have a more highly developed sense of hearing that they can use as a type of "sonar" to build an image of their environment. There is a story of a blind man who first "Saw" his girlfriend in the rain, due to the echoes bouncing off her body from the rain drops.

Yes, you are right. The method is called "echolocation". A blind person makes sounds - kind of clicks - by her tongue and listens echoes. Of course blind people learn to recognize sounds from external sources but echolocation is more like an extra sense.

Some researches show that echolocation engages areas in visual cortex, which is otherwise more or less useless in blind people. Visual cortex is very powerful processor, so in some cases the accuracy of echolocation may approach the accuracy of vision. Seeing persons can never learn echolocate similarly because vision competes for the same resources (and wins). We are locked out of the qualia of echolocation.

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy ... the-brain/

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

It's actually an infinite regress.

There is no screen because there is no one to watch the screen. There is no place in the brain where consciousness is unified. Consciousness is actually dis-unified.

That is your opinion. Your opinion has little to do with reality of the matter. Either there is a screen or there isn't. Your opinion does not change the existence of a screen, just as your opinion does not change the existence of a tree in the forest just because you're aren't there to watch it.

No, it is what the science tells us. The use of the term "screen" indicates a central place within the brain where consciousness takes place. To date no such place has been found. Instead the empirical evidence shows that consciousness can occur in many different places within the brain. Consciousness appears not to be unified.

That's not what I meant by screen, I stated and clarified that many times. By screen I said an array of neurons in the brain displaying visual data in physical space. I'm well aware consciousness is spread across many sectors. What you are doing is backtracking plain and simple.

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

Cogenitally blind people can dream in visual images, at the very least blobs. Some blind persons say they cannot, but I suspect the screen is there, just unused and underdeveloped, like how a paralyzed person has legs but can't feel them.

No they can't, because they have no visual memories. Of course they dream, but the "images" contain perceptions from other senses. I believe that seeing persons can't imagine what they are like. No more than we can imagine how bats perceive the world.

Like I said earlier the screen serves as hub for vital functions of the brain. It is a place of input and output, where as computer screens serve no vital function to the workings of the computer. It would be inneffecient to design a physical screen that did not correlate to physical space, as everything would become a tangled mess that would require constant translation and recalculation for mathematically accuracy.

Even if there was no screen, the brain would translate everything to be mathematically accurate and physically consistent with accepted reality either way. Therefore, such accurately translated reality would be recieved by consciousness, post-process.

So you agree that a screen is not necessary, if some other method or principle can unite information into conscious perception about reality?

What about if this accurately translated reality IS NOT RECEIVED by consciousness but the translation itself IS consciousness of the said reality?

Are you blind? How would you know this? Some born blind say they can. Is your opinion more valid that theirs?

After all, electrical waves are a form of light. Light is already in the brain, when you close your eyes you can see shapes and patterns. Even if you were born without eyes it is possible you could still have a visual imagination based on touch and spatial sense.

"RECIEVED" Input and output is the same deal. One man's output is another man's input. I don't recieve your consciousness signals all I recieve from you is text online. There are millions of brains, but I only sense the output from one brain. I recieve the output. Since I doubt there is freewill, I would say I dont put much input. If there was no such thing as localized reciever, I would be conscious of all brains at the same time. It would be like designing a camera that could percieve every part of the world simultaneously, it would be n-dimensional, it would just be like a blob a smear, a cluster of infinite pixels to us.

[SpheresOfBalance]

1. If pain is only c fibers firing (there is nothing pain feels like) then there is nothing wrong with torture, if it doesnt result in physical damage. Why would anyone care if c fibers fire up?
I think you should put this to the test on yourself. Torture yourself or have someone torture you and see if you care if those fibers fire. I believe it's just your body letting you know it's being damaged in some way, so as to avoid it.

2. Visualize a triangle. Anti- qualia people ( if they are consistent) must say that it is impossible to visualize a triangle. I know that I can visualize a triangle. I trust my empirical data.
There is no objective visualized triangle. My neurons do not fire in a triangular shape. If I visualize green, no part of my brain turns green.
Since no one can see my visualized triangle, an anti qualia person must say that it doesnt exist. In other words I cannot visualize a triangle.True, I cannot prove that I am visualizing a triangle. However, I am absolutely certain that I can visualize a triangle.
Visualize a triangle. If you can you have just proved to yourself that qualia exist!

Actually you've just proven that someone told you that, "this is a triangle," so you believed it. If from day one I showed a child a square, telling him it was a triangle, and he believed me, would he experience the qualia of a triangle if he visualized a square?

The same is true of color. We could both see a green light, and go as we were taught to do, it's the light in the position that it's in, and each of us sees what each of us sees. But in fact we could each see totally different things, and we would never know it. Because our particular visual sensors always picked up what we saw, that others pointed to calling it green. Such that what we saw, even though completely different from what another saw, would be green. No one would ever be the wiser, because no one can see through anothers visual sensory system. Then where does that leave the qualia of green? Nowhere to be found.

It's an illusion as we each believe, usually without question, that we all see the same thing, without possibly knowing whether it's true or not. Qualia?

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

1. If pain is only c fibers firing (there is nothing pain feels like) then there is nothing wrong with torture, if it doesnt result in physical damage. Why would anyone care if c fibers fire up?
I think you should put this to the test on yourself. Torture yourself or have someone torture you and see if you care if those fibers fire. I believe it's just your body letting you know it's being damaged in some way, so as to avoid it.

2. Visualize a triangle. Anti- qualia people ( if they are consistent) must say that it is impossible to visualize a triangle. I know that I can visualize a triangle. I trust my empirical data.
There is no objective visualized triangle. My neurons do not fire in a triangular shape. If I visualize green, no part of my brain turns green.
Since no one can see my visualized triangle, an anti qualia person must say that it doesnt exist. In other words I cannot visualize a triangle.True, I cannot prove that I am visualizing a triangle. However, I am absolutely certain that I can visualize a triangle.
Visualize a triangle. If you can you have just proved to yourself that qualia exist!

Actually you've just proven that someone told you that, "this is a triangle," so you believed it. If from day one I showed a child a square, telling him it was a triangle, and he believed me, would he experience the qualia of a triangle if he visualized a square?

The same is true of color. We could both see a green light, and go as we were taught to do, it's the light in the position that it's in, and each of us sees what each of us sees. But in fact we could each see totally different things, and we would never know it. Because our particular visual sensors always picked up what we saw, that others pointed to calling it green. Such that what we saw, even though completely different from what another saw, would be green. No one would ever be the wiser, because no one can see through anothers visual sensory system. Then where does that leave the qualia of green? Nowhere to be found.

It's an illusion as we each believe, usually without question, that we all see the same thing, without possibly knowing whether it's true or not. Qualia?

Like I said it could be like an online computer game. The textures might not sync up (which explains why people have different taste in art), green might be red, but the core variables align (like xyz and direction.)

[SpheresOfBalance]

1. If pain is only c fibers firing (there is nothing pain feels like) then there is nothing wrong with torture, if it doesnt result in physical damage. Why would anyone care if c fibers fire up?
I think you should put this to the test on yourself. Torture yourself or have someone torture you and see if you care if those fibers fire. I believe it's just your body letting you know it's being damaged in some way, so as to avoid it.

2. Visualize a triangle. Anti- qualia people ( if they are consistent) must say that it is impossible to visualize a triangle. I know that I can visualize a triangle. I trust my empirical data.
There is no objective visualized triangle. My neurons do not fire in a triangular shape. If I visualize green, no part of my brain turns green.
Since no one can see my visualized triangle, an anti qualia person must say that it doesnt exist. In other words I cannot visualize a triangle.True, I cannot prove that I am visualizing a triangle. However, I am absolutely certain that I can visualize a triangle.
Visualize a triangle. If you can you have just proved to yourself that qualia exist!

Actually you've just proven that someone told you that, "this is a triangle," so you believed it. If from day one I showed a child a square, telling him it was a triangle, and he believed me, would he experience the qualia of a triangle if he visualized a square?

The same is true of color. We could both see a green light, and go as we were taught to do, it's the light in the position that it's in, and each of us sees what each of us sees. But in fact we could each see totally different things, and we would never know it. Because our particular visual sensors always picked up what we saw, that others pointed to calling it green. Such that what we saw, even though completely different from what another saw, would be green. No one would ever be the wiser, because no one can see through anothers visual sensory system. Then where does that leave the qualia of green? Nowhere to be found.

It's an illusion as we each believe, usually without question, that we all see the same thing, without possibly knowing whether it's true or not. Qualia?

Like I said it could be like an online computer game. The textures might not sync up (which explains why people have different taste in art), green might be red, but the core variables align (like xyz and direction.)

Sorry Trix I usually don't initially read any other post except the OP. Because I don't want anyones comments to flavor mine. I want mine to only come from me, so as to be honest. Then I read what others have said, and go from there.

I think I know what you mean. Though I can't think of any games with non syncing textures, that I've seen. Are you talking of textures syncing with 3D meshes?

[Ginkgo]

1. If pain is only c fibers firing (there is nothing pain feels like) then there is nothing wrong with torture, if it doesnt result in physical damage. Why would anyone care if c fibers fire up?

A philosophical zombie cannot have experience, therefore it cannot feel pain. If you poke it with a pin it would say, "Ouch" and then behave in an aggressive manner. It would probably say,"How dare you do that to me". This is all just an act or programmed response. The philosophical zombie doesn't really feel pain and it doesn't really feel angry. The argument is that if the behaviour and reporting of information matches the scenario then this is all that matters in terms of experience.

At face values this seems like a trite argument, but it does have importance when it come s to qualia. How can one tell what a phenomenological experience actually is if of all we have to go on is what the person reports and how they behave in a particular situation. We just assume that there is a quality of experience attached to an unfortunate individual who gets a pin stuck into them.

2. Visualize a triangle. Anti- qualia people ( if they are consistent) must say that it is impossible to visualize a triangle. I know that I can visualize a triangle. I trust my empirical data.
There is no objective visualized triangle. My neurons do not fire in a triangular shape. If I visualize green, no part of my brain turns green.
Since no one can see my visualized triangle, an anti qualia person must say that it doesnt exist. In other words I cannot visualize a triangle.True, I cannot prove that I am visualizing a triangle. However, I am absolutely certain that I can visualize a triangle.
Visualize a triangle. If you can you have just proved to yourself that qualia exist!

Those who reject the qualia argument would quickly say that can be imagined and explained with resorting to a subjective account of such shapes.

Actually you've just proven that someone told you that, "this is a triangle," so you believed it. If from day one I showed a child a square, telling him it was a triangle, and he believed me, would he experience the qualia of a triangle if he visualized a square?

Probably, because qualia is a quality. of expereince. If there is "something it is like" to experience a shape of any kind then this would probably be the case. On the other hand, when it comes to mistaking a triangle for a square then we would say the experience is systematically different and can undergo a correction based on weight of opinion.

The same is true of color. We could both see a green light, and go as we were taught to do, it's the light in the position that it's in, and each of us sees what each of us sees. But in fact we could each see totally different things, and we would never know it. Because our particular visual sensors always picked up what we saw, that others pointed to calling it green. Such that what we saw, even though completely different from what another saw, would be green. No one would ever be the wiser, because no one can see through anothers visual sensory system. Then where does that leave the qualia of green? Nowhere to be found.

It's an illusion as we each believe, usually without question, that we all see the same thing, without possibly knowing whether it's true or not. Qualia?

The thing about qualia is the phenomenological aspect of the experience. So it's not so much the "greenness" of the object, but the quality of experience associated with viewing a coloured object. It doesn't really matter if we are mistaken in terms of identifying the colour, it is the quality of experience associated with the identification. The possibility of qualia being a property of objects is a different sort of argument.