Explain consciousness to the layman.

[PixyMisa]

What? Neuroscientists use the term qualia.

True. They shouldn't.

Qualia refers to the unique subjective experience an individual feels.

As originally defined, it meant the subjective experience as distinct from any physical process. Since subjective experiences are physical processes, that definition doesn't work terribly well.

 

[yy2bggggs]

True. They shouldn't.

Why not? It's just a word.

As originally defined, it meant the subjective experience as distinct from any physical process. Since subjective experiences are physical processes, that definition doesn't work terribly well.

Which particular original definition are you referring to? (More specifically, I'm looking for a citation of the definition, not the definition per se).

 

[MuDPhuD]

That's the reason that the term "qualia" was invented - to separate the externally observable behaviours from the experience of being conscious. It's the part of consciousness that has no explanation. Hence the necessity of providing a way to bypass the concept.

I disagree that it has no explanation.
Consider your experience of vision; the environment, objects, colors, etc.
You no doubt appreciate the beauty of the full spectrum of human color perception, including red apples, green leaves, and blue sky. My father, on the other hand, carries a single base pair substitution in one of his opsin genes, resulting in a nonfunctional opsin protein in one of his three types of cone photoreceptors in the retina. This tiny alteration in DNA completely alters his experience of color, such that he can not tell red from green apples, for example.

Dim the lights to a very low level (dim moonlight level) and your experience of color will also vanish. You will see the world and the objects in it, but will not appreciate color at all. That is because the retinal photoreceptors that give you an appreciation of color are not activated in low light situations. Low light vision is mediated by the rod photoreceptors, which are very sensitive, but incapable of distinguishing wavelengths. Your visual experience, again, is entirely dependent on the neurophysiological substrate.
Push on the globe of you eye with your finger, and the objects and world you see will bounce and vibrate in a most disturbing way. Your experience of a visually stable world around you results from an intricate system of eye muscle control that precisely counters every subtle movement of your head with an equal and exactly opposite movement of both your eyes to maintain a stable fixed gaze and an impression of a stable world around you. Your experience of the world in this case (as not moving) is completely dependent on a complex system of senses (visual, proprioceptive, and vestibular) and motor control. Damage to the nervous system in any of these systems will destroy your experience of stability in the world around you.
Drink enough ethanol to raise your blood alcohol to high levels, and the alcohol will leach into the endolymph in your semicircular canals, generating currents in the fluid, which will result in the definite and disturbing sensation of the world spinning around you.

In all these simple examples (and I could go on and on) the experience or perception of the world is clearly seen to be entirely dependent on the nervous system substrate you possess. Our experience of living is both limited by and entirely dependent on the function of our brains, and sense organs. They are one and the same, hence no need to distinguish them with a vague term.

 

[PixyMisa]

Why not? It's just a word.

For the same reason psychologists shouldn't explain mental illness in terms of demons.

Which particular original definition are you referring to? (More specifically, I'm looking for a citation of the definition, not the definition per se).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia#Definitions

Frank Jackson's definition makes the problem obvious, but even Lewis's original definition makes all sorts of unwarranted assumptions.

 

[!Kaggen]

Two very interesting research articles on subjective experience.

I think Paul C. Anagnostopoulos posted them up in the past.

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4888/1/Two_Conceptions_of_Subjective_Experience.pdf

http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cogsci/private/Churchland-chimeric-colors.pdf

 

[PixyMisa]

Drink enough ethanol to raise your blood alcohol to high levels, and the alcohol will leach into the endolymph in your semicircular canals, generating currents in the fluid, which will result in the definite and disturbing sensation of the world spinning around you.

Alcohol, mankind's millennia-long refutation of all immaterial theories of mind.

In all these simple examples (and I could go on and on) the experience or perception of the world is clearly seen to be entirely dependent on the nervous system substrate you possess. Our experience of living is both limited by and entirely dependent on the function of our brains, and sense organs. They are one and the same, hence no need to distinguish them with a vague term.

Indeed. Qualia is a consciousness-of-the-gaps argument.

 

[PixyMisa]

Two very interesting research articles on subjective experience.

Those do look interesting, and I haven't read them before. Thanks!

 

[PixyMisa]

So, the elements formed together to form the first living organism. This much I understand, but what about consciousness? This is never really explained, besides "neurons firing together in the brain" to form it, but this explanation never goes further than that when I hear it.

Douglas Hofstadter took 800 pages to write his explanation for the layman, and enough people missed the point that he had to go back and add a 400 page epilog.

Simply put: The brain is a computer. It processes sensory data of external and internal events, and uses that data to guide the body through the obstacles of life.

But - here's the interesting bit - the brain also processes data about its own workings, and feeds that data into its decision-making. Consciousness is what results when a computer starts to examine its own processing, whether that's deliberately engineered (the programming technique known as reflection) or naturally evolved.

 

[westprog]

Why not? It's just a word.

Which particular original definition are you referring to? (More specifically, I'm looking for a citation of the definition, not the definition per se).

Any admission that there is such a thing as subjective experience seems to be dangerous. There's a kind of panic that overwhelms people. Even admitting to having subjective experiences is not quite the kind of thing one should talk about.

There's nothing in the term "qualia" that carries any implications that subjective experience is mystical, or non-physical. It is a name for something that needs explanation, not an explanation itself.

One of the things that happens when this topic is discussed is that the merits of the argument become less important as people pick sides to support.

 

[PixyMisa]

Any admission that there is such a thing as subjective experience seems to be dangerous.

To whom?

There's a kind of panic that overwhelms people.

What people?

Even admitting to having subjective experiences is not quite the kind of thing one should talk about.

It isn't?

There's nothing in the term "qualia" that carries any implications that subjective experience is mystical, or non-physical.

Apart from the definition, anyway.

It is a name for something that needs explanation, not an explanation itself.

Indeed, it's a denial of explanation.

One of the things that happens when this topic is discussed is that the merits of the argument become less important as people pick sides to support.

Well, for those whose arguments have no merit, there's not much left, is there?

 

[westprog]

In all these simple examples (and I could go on and on) the experience or perception of the world is clearly seen to be entirely dependent on the nervous system substrate you possess. Our experience of living is both limited by and entirely dependent on the function of our brains, and sense organs. They are one and the same, hence no need to distinguish them with a vague term.

That subjective experience is entirely dependent on the nervous system is a fact about subjective experience. It's not an explanation of subjective experience.

We know that we understand respiration, say, because we can duplicate all the physical processes involved and produce identical effects. We don't know what physical processes produce subjective experience, beyond the fact that it happens in the human nervous system.

It's an area where unproveable, contradictory but absolutely confident assertions are made. Do we have any way to test the truth of these assertions?

As to the term - well, should we differentiate between subjective experience, and the physical processes which give rise to subjective experience? Since we do know, approximately, and in a personal sense, what subjective experience is, and we don't know, in any precise way, exactly what physical processes produce the subjective experience, it makes sense to differentiate between the two.

If we are to discover, by means of scientific investigation, how subjective experience arises, then we have to start by isolating the phenomenon as much as possible.

 

[yy2bggggs]

For the same reason psychologists shouldn't explain mental illness in terms of demons.

Could you tell me what that reason is explicitly?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia#Definitions

Frank Jackson's definition makes the problem obvious, but even Lewis's original definition makes all sorts of unwarranted assumptions.

In post #61 you referred to what the term means according to the original definition. But your response is just confusing.

Which definition did you mean to refer to in post #61 when you said this?:

As originally defined, it meant the subjective experience as distinct from any physical process. Since subjective experiences are physical processes, that definition doesn't work terribly well.​

...are you referring to Lewis's definition or Jackson's?

If you meant to refer to Lewis's definition, why bother mentioning Jackson at all? If you meant to refer to Jackson's definition, why say did you say original, and why use the phrase "but even Lewis's original definition..."?

 

[!Kaggen]

Yeah good points yy2bggggs

It is called "Poisoning the well"

 

[yy2bggggs]

It is called "Poisoning the well"

Well, I'm not going to call that just yet. I want to understand what's going on in PixyMisa's mind before I commit to anything. She might even have a point.

At the moment, it just seems fishy to me.

I'm in the process of reading Mind and The World Order at the moment--I think that might prove of interest.

 

[tsig]

Well, I'm not going to call that just yet. I want to understand what's going on in PixyMisa's mind before I commit to anything. She might even have a point.

At the moment, it just seems fishy to me.

I'm in the process of reading Mind and The World Order at the moment--I think that might prove of interest.

I think PM is a he.

 

[Matt the Poet]

Having struggled through some Thomas Metzinger, I’m now reasonably convinced that human consciousness can be defined as the effect of certain biological processes which:
a) Validate a simulation of external reality against sensory input such that it’s sufficiently accurate to be adaptively advantageous to the organism
b) Sort the simulation primarily into parts over which the organism has direct control and parts over which it doesn’t.
c) Generate the necessarily unshakeable illusion that the latter elements of the simulation ‘are’ the organism and the former parts ‘are’ the world it inhabits.

c)is the thing that generates the sense of ‘awareness’. Without it an organism may be ‘conscious’ in the sense of having access to a model of its environment, but won’t be able to ‘perceive’ anything because it doesn’t ‘know’ what it’s ‘perceiving with’. Other kinds of animal consciousness, or disordered human consciousness, do c) to a lesser extent, or don’t do it at all.

Metzinger illustrates this with the phenomenon of ‘blindsight’ – where neural damage causes someone to lose the (c) element of ‘vision’ without there being any actual damage to the sensory equipment. The patient is absolutely insistent that they can’t see what’s in front of them even as they successfully identify it (they tend to claim they’re making ‘lucky guesses’). If seeing was a matter of there being fundamental ‘qualia’ of vision this shouldn’t be possible.

 

[Complexity]

Why not? It's just a word.

It is a word with serious baggage that guarantees that it will be misinterpreted by those inclined to do so.

Its use should be avoided at all cost (except for mockery and derision).

 

[!Kaggen]

Well, I'm not going to call that just yet. I want to understand what's going on in PixyMisa's mind before I commit to anything. She might even have a point.

At the moment, it just seems fishy to me.

I'm in the process of reading Mind and The World Order at the moment--I think that might prove of interest.

Certainly does, thanks.
Now to find a cheap copy.

 

[Minoosh]

Both statements are false, because you don't understand quantum mechanics.

That "because" looks suspect.

 

[westprog]

Having struggled through some Thomas Metzinger, I’m now reasonably convinced that human consciousness can be defined as the effect of certain biological processes which:
a) Validate a simulation of external reality against sensory input such that it’s sufficiently accurate to be adaptively advantageous to the organism
b) Sort the simulation primarily into parts over which the organism has direct control and parts over which it doesn’t.
c) Generate the necessarily unshakeable illusion that the latter elements of the simulation ‘are’ the organism and the former parts ‘are’ the world it inhabits.

c)is the thing that generates the sense of ‘awareness’. Without it an organism may be ‘conscious’ in the sense of having access to a model of its environment, but won’t be able to ‘perceive’ anything because it doesn’t ‘know’ what it’s ‘perceiving with’. Other kinds of animal consciousness, or disordered human consciousness, do c) to a lesser extent, or don’t do it at all.

Metzinger illustrates this with the phenomenon of ‘blindsight’ – where neural damage causes someone to lose the (c) element of ‘vision’ without there being any actual damage to the sensory equipment. The patient is absolutely insistent that they can’t see what’s in front of them even as they successfully identify it (they tend to claim they’re making ‘lucky guesses’). If seeing was a matter of there being fundamental ‘qualia’ of vision this shouldn’t be possible.

Funny, I would give that as an excellent illustration of exactly what "qualia" are - where everything to do with seeing is there except the experience of it. If there were no subjective experience involved, then there would be no difference between the two situations.

Of course it's possible to have an experience which is not conscious. A stimulus which causes the body to produce insulin, for example.