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What did you learn by having a feeling? It couldn't be what the feeling feels like, because that leads to an infinite loop of the feelings being what it is like when you have a feeling - which looks like english words in the correct order but leads us nowhere.
I don't see the infinite loop you are referring to. Just the opposite. I see qualia as part of the bed-rock of reality. An experience of pain doesn't necessarily refer to anything else; I don't need a second-order concept (a "feeling of a feeling of pain") in order to experience pain, so I see no need for an infinite loop.
So what do I learn by experiencing pain? It is one of the simplest things that I can learn: I learn what it is like to be in pain. This stands in contrast, for example, to learning what it is like to behave as if I am in pain, or learning what someone's neural activity looks like when they are in pain. I could be an actress playing the role of a woman given birth to a child. I could play the role in a very convincing manner, but I suspect that I would still learn something new if I were to experience the actual plain of giving birth. Perhaps if I've had similar pains I could extrapolate from the pains I've known and roughly imagine the pain of childbirth, but if I've never felt pain at all (say, I've been completely "pain blind" since birth), then I don't think that studying mathematical models of the neural activity of women in childbirth will ever quite count as fully knowing what it is like to experience the pain of childbirth.
(Again I leave open the possibility that studying the neural activity of other people could trigger my own subjective feeling of pain, even if I had previously been pain-blind, but then, in this case, I would be subjectively experiencing pain, so we come back to my original point, which is that to really know pain, you have to have a first-person acquaintance with pain. For me to learn all about pain from neuroscience, the theoretical knowledge of the neural correlates of pain must, at some point, bridge the gap and become first-person knowledge of what it is like to be in pain. The first-person step in the process cannot be avoided. I just don't think that anyone could know all about pain if they are not able to experience it for themselves. Theoretical knowledge alone is simply not enough for a full understanding of qualitative experience.)
False. It might be possible to implant false memories of experiencing red, for example. She would then understand what it is like to experience red without ever having had the first person experience of being exposed to red.
I think my previous post about pain-blindness already addresses this, but just for emphasis: Implanting false memories could, as you say, allow her to "understand what it is like to experience red" even though she was never actually exposed to red light. Fine. I have no problem with this. By whatever means she comes about having the first-person experience of red, the bottom line is that she needs to have the first-person experience of red to fully understand what it is like to see red. The gap from third-person to first-person still needs to be bridged. To truly understand qualia, you must experience the qualia for yourself; theoretical knowledge about other people's neural activity will never be sufficient for understanding their qualitative experience UNLESS this theoretical knowledge triggers your own first-person acquaintance with the qualia. As I said, the first-person step is necessary. You cannot logically avoid the first-person/subjective aspect of qualitative experience.
I was referring to your words that "I've been pushing the idea that physical systems have properties that cannot be fully understood in purely objective terms". I was just pointing out that if there are properties we do not understand now - then that just means we do not understand them now. It does not mean they "cannot" be understood. We simply do not know that.
Hopefully my previous two post have already driven this point home, but I will try to put this as explicitly as possible: We CAN understand the subjective/qualitative aspects of physical processes, but we cannot fully understand them UNLESS, somehow, we ourselves can somehow experience the qualia in a first-person/subjective way. You will never fully know what it is like to experience pain just by studying the neural activity and pain-behavior of other people UNLESS this theoretical knowledge triggers YOUR OWN subjective experience of pain.
We don't need to wait for technological advancements in order to know that this is true. We know this now. In some cases simple logic is sufficient for knowledge. This is one of those cases.
I think what I have been consistently saying is that if we do model it and create a system that is concious - that this systems consciousness would be no more or less real or valid than our own.
And I think that I have consistently agreed with you on this. I expect that we will someday build conscious machines and, when we do, their conscious experiences will be no less real than our own. I don't think that being alive is sufficient to count as "being conscious" but I do think that being conscious is sufficient to count as being alive.
I could be wrong but here is my prediction: I think that we can probably create living things that are not conscious, but I doubt that it will ever be possible to create a conscious creature that is not alive - by any reasonably scientific standard of what it means to be "alive." I see Reality as fundamentally qualitative (perhaps, in some sense "unconscious" or "pre-conscious"?), but I don't see Reality - in its most fundamental/primordial "essence" - as intrinsically conscious. I think that all instances of conscious experience always emerge/evolve from unconscious qualitative processes - probably via principles or rules that can someday be mathematically modeled.
I don't see the infinite loop you are referring to. Just the opposite. I see qualia as part of the bed-rock of reality. An experience of pain doesn't necessarily refer to anything else; I don't need a second-order concept (a "feeling of a feeling of pain") in order to experience pain, so I see no need for an infinite loop.
But experience isn't qualia. Qualia is the feeling of what it is like when you have an experience. And that feeling is itself an experience, which itself feels like something, which is another experience, which in itself feels like something. And so on. Seems that this model of brain function causes some interesting problem when you actually follow it through.
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So what do I learn by experiencing pain? It is one of the simplest things that I can learn: I learn what it is like to be in pain.
And what have you learned that it is like?
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Perhaps if I've had similar pains I could extrapolate from the pains I've known
Can you, though? What method can I use to verify that your memory and recall of qualia is accurate?
I think my previous post about pain-blindness already addresses this, but just for emphasis: Implanting false memories could, as you say, allow her to "understand what it is like to experience red" even though she was never actually exposed to red light. Fine. I have no problem with this. By whatever means she comes about having the first-person experience of red, the bottom line is that she needs to have the first-person experience of red to fully understand what it is like to see red. The gap from third-person to first-person still needs to be bridged.
As long as none of the machines used to implant the memory are red, nowhere in the process of implanting a memory of an experience does she experience red. Yet she now knows exactly what it is like to experience red at least as well as a person who learned through actual experience. The gap has been bridged without her having an actual first person experience.
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To truly understand qualia, you must experience the qualia for yourself
Nope. In this scenario, she's never experienced red and yet she has all the understanding of someone who has. Sure, she's not experiencing red currently but neither is someone who had the first person experience in the past and is recalling their experience. How exactly could you tell the two subjects apart*?
* - aside from real world considerations caused by the fact that brains in reality don't act like brains in this made-up imaginary scenario, of course. But if we're not going to be limited by that in the setup of the hypothetical, no fair bringing it up now as if it means anything.
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theoretical knowledge about other people's neural activity will never be sufficient for understanding their qualitative experience UNLESS this theoretical knowledge triggers your own first-person acquaintance with the qualia. As I said, the first-person step is necessary. You cannot logically avoid the first-person/subjective aspect of qualitative experience.
This example does exactly that, no matter how many times you repeat the mantra that it can't possibly do so.
But experience isn't qualia. Qualia is the feeling of what it is like when you have an experience. And that feeling is itself an experience, which itself feels like something, which is another experience, which in itself feels like something. And so on.
If you want to go down this path, we will need to find some definition of 'experience' that we can agree on. In the context of this conversation, I'm referring to 'experience' in the sense of "know-how" or "procedural knowledge" (in contrast to propositional knowledge). An experience, in this sense, is the act of "living through" an event or process. A mountain undergoes erosion, but for our purposes I would not say that it "experiences" erosion because the mountain is not an active agent. An active agent processes an event by categorizing inputs (aspects of the event that have causal effects on the agent) in terms of actual or potential behaviors (i.e., more or less goal-directed responses to the event in light of the agent's need to survive as a self-organizing process).
Not every experience is a conscious experience. Agents will, more often than not, live through an experience and in many cases even act in accordance with the experience without any awareness of the experience as "my experience."
I would, however, argue that every experience is qualitative, and I would further suggest that it is the qualitative aspects of experience that account for the dynamics of the agent. In other words, the activity of an agent depends ultimately on the qualitative nature of the experience in the context of the agent's own qualitative "inner nature." Loosely speaking, you can think of an agent as "pushing back" on the world. Without agents there is no "pushing" in this sense, but without the context of a world, there is nothing for an agent to push, and thus there would be no agency (because agency is in the "pushing" - which requires a "pusher" and "that which is pushed.") Qualia are, on my view, intrinsic to the active nature of agency. Qualia basically ARE acts of pushing (i.e., acts of more or less goal-directed behavior in light of the agent/world combination). Since the pushing can be unconscious, qualia can be unconscious.
Neurologically there is growing evidence supporting my notion that consciousness is rooted in the "enactive" nature of agency. (I've referred to this in earlier posts, so I won't go over this at the moment.) The 64-billion-dollar question, of course, is the nature of the relationship between conscious and unconscious experience.
Quick aside: "Consciousness" (conscience, co-knowledge) is from Latin "conscious", which is from "con-" (a form of "com-" meaning "together") + scire ("to know). I'd say it is not too far fetched to say that consciousness is a sort of knowing.
Seeing a cat is a qualitative experience, even if you are not consciously aware of seeing the cat. Becoming consciously aware of seeing the cat is to see the cat "as a cat." This seeing the cat as a cat changes the nature of the "seeing" experience, and I would characterize this change in the nature of the experience as the transition from unconscious to conscious experience. I wish I could say that I have the final answers and could tie all of this together into a perfectly neat bow, but I can't. I will simply suggest, once again, that some processes are agents, agents experience the world, some of these experiences are conscious insofar as they involve a sort of "reflexive" knowledge - a perspective that the agent takes upon the very act of "pushing" against the world, which most likely involves some internal modeling of self in the context of the world.
I think you are comparing a foot with a hand to determine how we walk. How we are feeling at the time we see the red cat alters the experience of seeing the red cat each time. The background can do this, the sounds around you can do this, and so on. Just like Kc said. Thus if we call "experience" knowledge we can't know "everything". But I don't call "experiencing the red cat" "knowledge about the red cat". Evolution has provided a mechanism about how I may react to the red cat in order to eat or get to safety. it's all about dinner and making kids
If you want to go down this path, we will need to find some definition of 'experience' that we can agree on. In the context of this conversation, I'm referring to 'experience' in the sense of "know-how" or "procedural knowledge" (in contrast to propositional knowledge).
Are you sure? To pick an example at random :
"An experience of pain doesn't necessarily refer to anything else; I don't need a second-order concept (a "feeling of a feeling of pain") in order to experience pain, so I see no need for an infinite loop."
Seems that you're using it here to mean a raw sensory input, in contrast to the processing that lets us relate this experience to other things we know.
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Qualia basically ARE acts of pushing (i.e., acts of more or less goal-directed behavior in light of the agent/world combination).
This would imply that we can observe qualia in action using naturalistic observations the physical behavior of other people ... which kind of contradicts the whole point of the knowledge argument.
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Quick aside: "Consciousness" (conscience, co-knowledge) is from Latin "conscious", which is from "con-" (a form of "com-" meaning "together") + scire ("to know). I'd say it is not too far fetched to say that consciousness is a sort of knowing.
Except for the fact that we're not using Latin here. Word games like this are unconvincing.
Anyway, none of this answers the points I raised in my posts.
Just a quick aside on this: I'm not sure of very much, and I won't be surprised if, at some point, you will be able to catch me saying contradictory things. (In this case, I don't see a problem with my statement about pain, but I'll get to that in a moment.) Also, BTW, I can't shake the feeling that if we could find the right way to express ourselves, we'd find that we don't really have a disagreement. (I have this memory of when I was a kid: My mom and dad having long, bitter arguments over things and, from my perspective, it seemed they were saying exactly the same thing. Being a child I could have easily been missing some subtlety, but nevertheless the feeling sticks with me to this day - the idea of people shouting at each other trying to prove they're right and the other is wrong, and then there's this perspective from which it becomes obvious that they are both saying the same damn thing - they just can't seem to see it. Philosophical arguments over the nature of qualia always feel this way to me, but I can't seem to find the perspective that dissolves the appearance of disagreement. Ok, so getting back to the issue at hand:
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"An experience of pain doesn't necessarily refer to anything else; I don't need a second-order concept (a "feeling of a feeling of pain") in order to experience pain, so I see no need for an infinite loop."
Seems that you're using it here to mean a raw sensory input, in contrast to the processing that lets us relate this experience to other things we know.
I doubt that there is any such thing as "raw sensory input." I believe that there can be unconscious pain, which would be pain without "a feeling of a feeling of pain," but this would still not be "raw" input; it would still be processed - categorized in terms of potentials for behavior or possible motivations for behavior in various contexts. Even in the case of visual input - say, the color red (where it seems like maybe we could make sense of some "raw" input underlying the sensation of seeing red) - even in this case I am skeptical that the notion of "raw input" can count as an "experience" of red. Prior to neural processing, the light hitting the retinae is probably comparable to the "erosion" of a mountain - i.e., just a process - not really an "experience." In any case, I stand by my statement. I don't need a "feeling of a feeling of pain" in order to experience pain.
Now, for pain to rise to a level of conscious perception of pain as pain, a "higher order" process kicks in, and I think the brain creates a model of "self" in relation to an objectified "content" of experience - the pain takes on the appearance of an "object" of perception; there is the pain, and there is the "I" who perceives the pain. The "I" wants to make the pain disappear without the "I" itself disappearing, thus the pain is conceived as an "object" - a "not-self". I think there is a sort of illusion in this higher-order process of objectification. The apparent boundary between "self" and "not-self" is an epistemological creation - not an ontologically-based duality, although it seems like an ontological duality - thus the illusory nature of this aspect of the experience. This also plays a role in why I take and "extended mind" view of consciousness - the idea that consciousness is not "in the head" but is, rather, a brain/body/world process.
To me, this all seems to make sense in terms of experience characterized as the subjective/qualitative aspect of a certain type of physical process (i.e., a process that is an agent). The "qualitative" aspect, as I said, basically just is the "pushing" of the agent against the larger physical context (aka "the world"). An agent, keep in mind, is a process that "cares" about its context in terms of goals related to survival/self-maintenance - unlike a mountain that has no goals and doesn't care about its survival. The "pushing" logically requires a "pusher" and a "pushed." But any given act of "pushing" logically requires a particular pusher. In other words, the agent in any given instance is a particular process, and no other process can be this particular process. Thus we get the infamously indexical nature of subjectivity. The feeling of the experience - the qualia - is the pushing, and the pushing is logically grounded on a particular agent who is doing the pushing. Only the particular agent can carry out its particular actions.
Overall I guess I'm saying that "the buck stops" at the particularity of the agent. You have the first-order "pushing" - which basically just is the qualitative nature of experience - and in some cases you have a second-order (aka "reflexive") aspect of the experience which turns the qualitative aspect of the experience into a "object" of perception (the cat as a cat, the pain as pain), and this is what we call conscious awareness ("co-knowing") of the experience. The "first knowing" is just the unconscious process of categorizing in terms of what the agent "cares about," and the "second knowing" is the reflexive act of "objectification" wherein an epistemological self/world distinction is made and the first-order X becomes the second-order "X as X".
Linguistically we can go on to higher and higher levels (e.g., know that we know that we know...) but this is just a by-product of the nature of language and conceptual thinking; nothing is actually required for consciousness beyond the second-order objectification of X as X. The buck stops at the second order because the agent is a particular process and no other process can be this particular process, so any higher-order "knower who knows, who knows..." is mere conceptual word play - a relatively useless by-product of a more fundamental potential, namely, the capacity of the agent to recognize itself as a "self".
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