And then there's Qualia. What about it is a mystery?

Philosophy of Mind
966

No, just as no-one claimed that the TV’s photons were located in the brain. Or that no-one claimed that saying pain exists in the brain entails fire being in the brain.
Honestly I don’t follow what the problem is here. Colour is a mental phenomenon based on data from the optic nerve (just as pain is a mental phenomenon from data from nociceptors).
It’s trivial to demonstrate this, though it’s also common that there’s some resistance to accepting this fact at first because colour intuitively feels “out there”.

Look at the thread history for the word “solipsism”; who brought it up in the first place and who was using it to support his/her arguments.

967

But “the optic nerve…is a mental phenomenon based on data from the optic nerve…is a mental phenomenon based on data from the optic nerve…”

In one breath, all experience is “internal stuff.” But the “justification” for this claim is in terms of “external stuff” that has become problematic.

In the olden days, philosophers used primary versus secondary qualities to try to ameliorate this incoherence.

11. How Bodies produce Ideas in us.

The next thing to be considered is, how bodies operate one upon another; and that is manifestly by impulse, and nothing else. It being impossible to conceive that body should operate on WHAT IT DOES NOT TOUCH (which is all one as to imagine it can operate where it is not), or when it does touch, operate any other way than by motion.

12. By motions, external, and in our organism.

If then external objects be not united to our minds when they produce ideas therein; and yet we perceive these ORIGINAL qualities in such of them as singly fall under our senses, it is evident that some motion must be thence continued by our nerves, or animal spirits, by some parts of our bodies, to the brains or the seat of sensation, there to produce in our minds the particular ideas we have of them. And since the extension, figure, number, and motion of bodies of an observable bigness, may be perceived at a distance by the sight, it is evident some singly imperceptible bodies must come from them; to the eyes, and thereby convey to the brain some motion; which produces these ideas which we have of them in us.

13. How secondary Qualities produce their ideas.

After the same manner that the ideas of these original qualities are produced in us, we may conceive that the ideas of SECONDARY qualities are also produced, viz. by the operation of insensible particles on our senses. For, it being manifest that there are bodies and good store of bodies, each whereof are so small, that we cannot by any of our senses discover either their bulk, figure, or motion,—as is evident in the particles of the air and water, and others extremely smaller than those; perhaps as much smaller than the particles of air and water, as the particles of air and water are smaller than peas or hail-stones;—let us suppose at present that, the different motions and figures, bulk and number, of such particles, affecting the several organs of our senses, produce in us those different sensations which we have from the colours and smells of bodies; v.g. that a violet, by the impulse of such insensible particles of matter, of peculiar figures and bulks, and in different degrees and modifications of their motions, causes the ideas of the blue colour, and sweet scent of that flower to be produced in our minds. It being no more impossible to conceive that God should annex such ideas to such motions, with which they have no similitude, than that he should annex the idea of pain to the motion of a piece of steel dividing our flesh, with which that idea hath no resemblance.

14. They depend on the primary Qualities.

What I have said concerning colours and smells may be understood also of tastes and sounds, and other the like sensible qualities; which, whatever reality we by mistake attribute to them, are in truth nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us; and depend on those primary qualities, viz. bulk, figure, texture, and motion of parts and therefore I call them SECONDARY QUALITIES.

15. Ideas of primary Qualities are Resemblances; of secondary, not.

From whence I think it easy to draw this observation,—that the ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves, but the ideas produced in us by these secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our ideas, existing in the bodies themselves. They are, in the bodies we denominate from them, only a power to produce those sensations in us: and what is sweet, blue, or warm in idea, is but the certain bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts, in the bodies themselves, which we call so.

source

In the first bolded part, we find a prejudice confessed. “Obviously” things have to “touch” that affect one another. Why ? In the applied science of the day, this is what mattered.

His invocation of a “power” reminds me of Mill, but Mill gives a careful analysis of how the expected possibility of perceptual manifestation gets “transfigured” into a matter that is “other than” a logical-temporal synthesis of phenomena. Something like “matter” is “projected behind” the empirical world. One can do nothing with such a projection scientifically. Instead we get a “sophisticated” armchair metaphysicks that tells us that apples aren’t “Really” sweet.

But there’s a different approach to the structure of shared physical objects that allows for the apple being sweet to Joe but bitter for Suzy.

968

He said that colours are a mental phenomenon, not that optic nerves are a mental phenomenon, just as he said that pain is a mental phenomenon, not that fire is a mental phenomenon.

This isn’t all-or-nothing, as if either optic nerves and fire are mental phenomena or colour and pain are not mental phenomena.

Just using our everyday, ordinary understanding of the world, coupled with a reasonable understanding of physics and biology, we can unproblematically determine that colours and pain are mental phenomena and optic nerves and fire aren’t.

Nothing about this entails that we ought be global sceptics, solipsists, or idealists.

969

Interesting read, if confusing for me.

Seems to me a little Jakob von Uexküll’s “Umwelt” might help clarify the impasse.

The Umwelt

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt. He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals.
… The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the umgebung. …

The interesting part is that each organism presumably assumes its umwelt to be the entire objective reality “out there. …”

The term Umwelt refers to the world experienced by living beings of a particular species—the world they perceive and act within. It is not an objective environment, but rather a subjective world constructed from the organism’s own meanings.Footnote 1

Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) believed that every living creature inhabits a world of its own. The structure of this world is largely determined by the species to which a creature belongs, by its physiology, its behaviour, and its environment, but this world discloses itself only through individual subjective experience. As such, these worlds are both private and unique to each living subject. Uexküll coined the technical term Umwelt to refer to these worlds of subjective experience. … his notion of Umwelt also has deeply unsettling consequences for the way we understand the world and our place in it. {Seems to me rather clarifying}

Uexküll’s thought is a three-fold provocation:

  1. He posits a world of experience for each living creature that is strictly beyond the reach of scientific knowledge, offending the boundless optimism in science engendered by centuries of technological successes and cultural dominance;

  2. None of these Umwelten has a different metaphysical status than the others. Since we humans, including human scientists, are also living creatures, the world we each experience and study gives us no privileged access to an objective truth about a mind-independent world;

  3. The claim that each human individual experiences a private phenomenal world of its own, and can never access the Umwelt of anyone else, has deeply disturbed many thinkers.

I simply mention him and his ideas because no one else has and it would be fun to see what others think of them.

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970

With respect to sight and light we could consider two species each with three types of cone cells which collectively cover the same wavelength range but with different sensitives, for example:

Species 1

  1. 300nm - 400nm, peaking at 350nm
  2. 400nm - 500nm, peaking at 450nm
  3. 500nm - 600nm, peaking at 550nm

Species 2

  1. 300nm - 350nm, peaking at 325nm
  2. 350nm - 450nm, peaking at 400nm
  3. 450nm - 600nm, peaking at 525nm

Given what we know about the relationship between an organism’s cone cells and its colour experiences (e.g. with the comparison between humans and birds) it stands to reason that these two species will see different colours despite looking at the same thing and being sensitive to the same “environmental signals”.

971

I’ve encountered his writings. I think he’s a sadly neglected figure. I wrote about him in an essay on phenomenology where I said ‘Von Uexküll demonstrates that there is no organism-independent, truly objective environment that the creature inhabits. The world as experienced is always already shaped by the nature of the experiencer. Subjecthood is not a late and accidental addition to an otherwise meaningless physical universe — it is constitutive of what it means to be a living being at all.’ I also tied this in to Husserl’s concept of the lebenswelt, the ‘life-world’ of humans. ‘The lifeworld is the world as it is actually lived: the world of colors and sounds, meanings and values, the world in which we encounter one another and make sense of our lives. It is in the lebenswelt that meaning is grounded — in the incalculably vast causal nexus of culture and language, society and history, humanity and nature, of which the observer is part.’

From the second of the two sources you linked to:

Uexküll’s thought is a three-fold provocation:

  1. He posits a world of experience for each living creature that is strictly beyond the reach of scientific knowledge, offending the boundless optimism in science engendered by centuries of technological successes and cultural dominance;

  2. None of these Umwelten has a different metaphysical status than the others. Since we humans, including human scientists, are also living creatures, the world we each experience and study gives us no privileged access to an objective truth about a mind-independent world;

  3. The claim that each human individual experiences a private phenomenal world of its own, and can never access the Umwelt of anyone else, has deeply disturbed many thinkers.

What distinguishes the human lebenswelt from the creature’s umwelt, is the human ability to subject sensation to reflection - to reason about what sensation means, and what its causes are, as we’re doing in these discussions. (Indeed ‘lebenswelt’ is in some important sense ‘meaning world’.)

But we can’t loose sight of the fact that we’re still embedded in the processes that we’re attempting to describe — that we’re participants, not simply observers. Husserl’s critique of scientific realism was that it looses sight of the participatory nature of knowledge, that by according primacy to the measurable attributes of bodies it forgets that science too is a human undertaking. This is the basis of the book The Blind Spot of Science.

Which leads me to:

But that passage you quote from John Locke is one of the historical sources of ‘the hard problem of consciousness’. Notice the implicit supposition throughout the entire passage of the separateness of the observer from the observed, meaning that how ‘the object’ causes changes in ‘the subject’ is something that then needs to be explained. His account separates the physical world, described in terms of bulk, figure, motion and texture, from the ideas or sensations occurring in the mind. The latter are caused by the former, but are not themselves features of the physical description. Once that distinction is made, a question immediately arises: how does a physical process described entirely in objective terms produce a subjective experience such as blue, sweetness, warmth or pain? Locke’s appeal to God “annexing” ideas to motions effectively acknowledges the gap rather than explaining it (and you can also see how easily that morphs into Berkeley’s esse est percipe). The current ‘hard problem’ is, in an important historical sense, the problem that emerges when that explanatory gap is retained while the theological solution has been removed.

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972

The difference is that pain, unlike the bus, is located in the body.

973

Yes, I quote it critically, as a source of a confusion that endures.

I’ve been making the point that dualism ( rep realism) is not daring and counter-intuitive but a tired trope. The tradition has moved on. Obvious examples are Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But J.S. Mill, W. James, and E. Mach had already done the heavy lifting.

“Consciousness” is the “presence” of the “umvelt” “for” a particular organism within that umvelt. The phrase “objective reality” is —as serious metaphysicks — confused babble, though there are innocent enough mundane uses of the phrase.

I could say that “we see the objects and not internal images of the objects.” If I say this, it is not a “mirroring” of a “truthmaker” in “objective reality.” It’s a pointing “back down” to how we live, what we already know below the neck.

This is what still “will not compute” for many people. We can and do have a shared world without needing a “world from no point of view” that comes with a “glass of dehydrated water.” I’ll grant that some fascinating issues related to time come up this way, but those too have been address, IMO.

The challenge is addressing a system of prejudices at the same time.

  1. Philosophy tries to mirror “true reality” with “meaning stuff.” One ghost is arranged to match another ghost.
  2. Perceptions are internal entities.
  3. There is this weird thing known as “objective reality.”
  4. The word “truth” has a definite and secure and sublime meaning.
  5. The philosophers that get talked about today “must” be the best and greatest. It’s impossible that we are spinning our wheels in mud, bothering with problems whose solutions were forgotten.

And so on.

974

Thank you for saying that !

I’m shocked that I could be taken for arguing for solipsism. That’s the opposite of my position. As you say, I’m pointing out that indirect realism “promises” a solipsism that it’s too incoherent to deliver.

No one is an indirect realist below the neck.

When Rorty was dying, he regretted spending so much time on “fussy issues.” People ( myself at times in included) are just “deaf” to critique until they aren’t. If Mach and Einstein are ignored on this issue, then of course their paraphraser will be ignored.

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975

All of whom are very different and say very different things about a range of topics. Whereas I’m trying to isolate something in intellectual history which is specific to the question of why ‘qualia’ assume the significance that they do and what ‘the problem of consciousness’ is.

The point about Locke and the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is well documented. Galileo had already drawn a closely related distinction in The Assayer. When this distinction is combined with the Cartesian separation of mind and extended matter it produces something close to the basic architecture of modern empiricism: an objectively describable world of primary, quantitative properties on the one hand, and a realm of sensory qualities on the other. Locke develops this into his theory of ideas; later empiricists such as Mill and Mach inherit the essentials of that worldview.

The point I’m interested in is the separation between the knower and the known: there is something being represented, and someone for whom it is represented. Once you have that picture, it isn’t surprising that the relation between the two becomes a problem. How does an objectively describable process give rise to the subjective experience of colour, sound, pain and so on? How to rejoin what has been split asunder?

It is well known that Wittgenstein and Heidegger escape representationalism in their very different ways. But you seem to be conflating phenomenalists such as Mach and Mill with phenomenologists such as Husserl and Uexküll. Chalk and cheese! They are addressing quite different philosophical problems. (James’s ‘radical empiricism’ is another matter again, and in some respects an outlier in this genealogy.)

I see Husserl, in particular, as recognising and trying to get beneath the sense of separateness or otherness that pervades representationalism. His philosophy is not simply to offer another account of what happens inside the subject, but to become fully aware of the intentional relation in and through which subject and world are given. Situated rather than separated! That’s one reason his work became so seminal for European philosophy in particular (Heidegger, despite his decisive break with Husserl—and his shabby treatment of him after 1933—nevertheless inherited an enormous amount from him, as did much of subsequent European philosophy.)

And it’s noteworthy that, although one might expect Chalmers’s ‘hard problem of consciousness’ to have some affinity, phenomenology plays little role in his formulation of the problem. Chalmers situates himself much more directly the Cartesian/Lockean architecture: an objective physical description on one side and phenomenal experience on the other, with the explanatory gap between them.

976

On this issue, there is a thread connecting them. I’ve made a partial case for this over many posts. Yet I do not invoke them as authorities. Rather the point is that the tradition — its cutting edge — has moved beyond the “veil of perception” confusion.

Locke is a good source for that too. Because the same object varies in how much of the visual field it claims, the “seen object” must not be the “real” object. The “real object” was tacitly identified with the object for the hands, the tactile object. “The real is what resists.” Color didn’t matter as much to us as heavy resources to be moved, or penetrating cannon balls. The criterion for “reality” was implicitly pragmatic, but the philosopher identifies with theory — as a pure spectator. So the pragmatic criterion is suppressed and instead an omniscient narrator is invented.

The problem of “consciousness as stuff” is generated by theoretical fantasy of the “4D truth crystal” — of “objective reality.” The mundane pragmatic perceptual physical is replaced with theologickal cotton candy. Then we get qualia as stuff-in-consciousness-stuff as an awkward “epiphenomenon.” Consciousness-as-stuff and the theo-phony-physical are two sides of one coin. The “sober” pluralism that we live (promises and puppies and protons ) is exchanged for this or that fetishized ur-stuff.

Science is “transfigured.” Instead of low-cost empirical analogies that help us deal with high-stakes empirical situations, these analogies are magic hieroglyphics sketching a world beyond the veil.

Have you read Mill’s book on Hamilton ? Or Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations ? I hope you aren’t trusting AI on this. I have already quoted early Husserl on this. He explicitly credits Mach and Mill as crucial influences. We know that Wittgenstein read James, that James and Mach knew one another personally. We know that Heidegger read Avenarius. This is well documented.

What Mach and Mill inherit is a secular empirical attitude. From over here, I see you as lumping every godless empirical thinker together.

We might say that philosophy has two faces or two modes. One mode is constructive — religion by other means/memes — and the other is destructive — a critical investigation of the “meaning” of scientific terms, etc. The “immaterialism” in J. S. Mill is akin to critiques of the luminiferous ether or to Wittgenstein’s critique of “Cantor’s paradise.”

To me the answer is simple. We reject the split as yesterday’s confusion. The world is there for this or that organism. “Subjective experience” is redundant. The world is always “subjective” for each of us. But it is the shared environment that is there for us. We “know” this because we live this. But we “forget” when we play theory.

Avenarius critiqued introjection long ago. I need not interpret your seeing of a tree in terms of a little toy tree in your pineal gland. Indeed, that would be absurd, because then the you that I see is a toy you in my pineal gland. The entire shared world is “sucked into pineal glands.” But why should we believe in pineal glands then ?

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977

Not so fast! It’s not something that can just be glossed over or waved away in a sentence or to. It’s intrinsic to the whole question. And who brought up ‘pineal glands’? I’m not endorsing or advocating for Descartes. I’m trying to analyse the geneaology of the hard problem.

978

We’ve been over this. I’ve quoted relevant texts. It’s not a conflation. I know what AI will tell me about “phenomenalism” and “phenomenology.” But AI is a vomiting parrot.

So we agree very much on “situated rather than separated.” This is the connection to pragmatism (Okrent on Heidegger.) The world is there as “already significant umvelt.” Things are there in terms of possibility. What can do I with this thing ? What might this thing do to me ? The world is “structured” by “care.” “Primordial time” is the shape of the primate’s “now.” This “now” is suffused by “past” and “future.” The specificity of the reaching hand is past/present/future at once. Thrown projection, a flying arrow.

The intentional relation is the “directedness of comportment.” With Heidegger we get free of the last residue of “mentalism.” The organism is “in the middle of doing something.” In particular, the human “mind” is visceral scheming. Or scheming incarnate. A navigator of the temporal depth of the world. This world is full of objects, that we want to be able to count on or avoid. This gets us into Kant and the “synthesis” that gives us both the enduring “experiencer” and enduring objects. “Perceptions” are immediately automatically “synthesized” in the sense of lived as perceptions of. The “thing in itself” (Kant) can be parsed as the “idea” of the thing ( Plato ) – which is to say its “enacted ideal unity” in the “forum.” In the shared environment. In the “lifeworld.” We don’t need dualism. An “ontological perspectivism” works just fine. Objectivity is just ideal subjectivity, which is plenty.

We are fundamentally social, more social than individual. Dramaturgical ontology. “Nothing is more real than the other people for whom we constantly perform.” The same object “shows itself differently” to others. This gives us “interior” to worry about, the possibility that people are lying, concealing something from us. The boy who cried wolf, etc.

979

I joke about pineal glands as a rhetorical device. The usual dualism is funny in retrospect. To me its like the theory has become so familiar that its strangeness is no longer felt.

I suggested the hard problem arose from a bogus projection of the “theo-physical.” The theological and the theoretical physical — both divorced from the pragmatic perceptual (and genuine ) physical.

To me the trickier issue is “the” past — the typical conception of a “universal clock time.” Then one can wring hands over “the time before sentience.” But I think Mill works here well enough also. My “opponents” on this issue can’t say what they mean by the “existence” of the past. More grist for my Mill. If one could go back, then one would perceive, etc. Perception, perception, perception. The enemy of philosophers ? One might think so. Fundamental trope : perception lies.

Note that there is “in theory” the “hard problem of the brute fact of the world.” But to me there’s just an end to explanation, for scientific explanation just links entities to entities. So we move on to grand narratives, myths, which don’t explain so much as orient and comfort.

980

That makes sense. To me the whole debate seems to be missing a chunk of progress. I briefly wasted time on the consciousness subreddit. No one had read anything good --a slight overstatement. I mean it’s only Reddit, but in general I am “feeling the presentism.”

981

Just to be clear, I am against idealism and solipsism. So I am against the attitude that would say that apples aren’t “really” red.

The old old questions remain. Is tactual sensation “real” ? What part of the fire is “real” ? The fire isn’t “really” orange. Is it really "hot " ?

Probably not.

Is it “really” what mathematical models “say” that it is ? But those are based on measurements, no ? Human perception and the assignment of empirical objects called “numerals” that “compress” a rich qualitative situation.

My claim would be that we live ( shrewdly) a direct-ish realism. So my 'plaint is just that reprealism is “alienated” and “inefficient.” Not ( even ) “wrong.” Because I also think the sign “truth” tends to live on a bad vision of how signs work in the first place.

In case it contextualizes my critique, I am something like a “hermeneutic neo-pragmatist.” AKA ( dialogical) positivism. To me it’s not about “deciding if color is real.” I’m interested in a deeper issue, at the level of framework. I suggest the “inside/outside” approach is largely exhausted. The metaphors were once helpful but now hobbling.

982

You effectively claim here that no more philosophical work is to be done; perhaps all that remains is to convince the naive realists, who have not caught up with modern science. That’s what “unproblematic” is hiding: it seems to mean something like directly, with no need for philosophy. But this is either a brute force rhetorical tactic, or else it’s a lack of awareness of the problematic, and philosophical, nature of the inference.

This can be seen by considering the authorities you appeal to. Common sense, i.e., “everyday, ordinary understanding of the world”, tells us the opposite of what you are claiming—fire engines, not experiences or mental states, are red. As for physics and biology, the step from “colour perception is causally mediated by the optic nerve etc.” to “colour is a mental phenomenon”, is not a finding of either, but a philosophical inference drawn from them.

Furthermore, these concepts mental and phenomenon are themselves problematic, specifically in that they have a complex history, most relevantly involving Locke and Berkeley*. They are not natural categories, unproblematically delivered by physics and biology.

*A history including the argument against Locke that the line between “mental” colour and “external” shape cannot be coherently drawn at all, since we know the shape only through perception too (which I think was one of @j_j’s points).

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983

Yes. And Mach specialized in studying this causal/functional relationship and rejected the usual dualism “inferred” from this relationship. Avenarius is also great on this. They both circumvented a dominant confusion.

Both of these thinkers ought to have the scientistic cred to punch through. But they aren’t famous like Wittgenstein, etc.

Bridgman’s “operationalism” is a “cure” for the metaphysical hubris that comes with grokking a little physics. How incautious people can be when it comes to parsing this stuff !

While I do pick a side ( toward the way we live non-theoretically), I’d settle for calling attention to an almost entirely neglected alternative. It’s neglected even though it’s right there in Einstein’s Physics and Reality and Schrödinger’s My View of the World.

The point is not that Einstein or anyone is an authority but rather that real scientists can be sophisticated philosophers — that physics does not “imply” indirect realism.

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984

I’m mostly on your side in this discussion and this is probably an off-topic tangent, but… are you assuming that subjective/objective aligns with, is the same as, or depends on, inside/outside? Because I don’t think they’re the same. At least, they don’t have to be.

Oddly, my mind has reached for Barthes to explain what I mean, so I’ll run with it. In “The Death of the Author” he rejects the Romantic picture—the inner self as the true source of meaning, with language as its secondary, merely instrumental medium. I fully agree with this rejection of interiority. But it doesn’t require a rejection of the subject’s practice, its engagement with things (language in this case). To pre-empt: I imagine you might bring in Vorhandenheit vs Zuhandenheit at this point, but all I mean by subject/object here is that there is a doer and a thing-that-is-done-with.

So, giving up the interior as the location of colour (or meaning) needn’t mean giving up the subject as something that does the perceiving or judging or doing.

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985

I think we are on the same page.

I see the “internal monologue” as a chain of tribal phonemes. “We think only in signs.” But signs are perceptual objects that “signify” differently as a “function” of the physiology and history of their perceiver. The “significance” of the sign is “given in/as the perception.” Even the “remembered/imagined voice” of the “interior monologue” has “quality.” It is phonemes, the minimal memory of shaped breath.

My selfhood is “there in the particular radiance” of the signs — for instance. But also there in the way that my wife’s face shows up for me. In a certain sense, my “self” is “out there” in the specificity of how objects show themselves. Familiar, uncanny, relevant to me, boring. “I can fix this typewriter ( the one found at the antique mall.) It’s a steal at 50 bucks.”

We could also get into the “performance” of the self as a locus of responsibility. This body “enacts” the “meme” of the time-binding virtual praise-blame target. A proper name is a toe tag. The word “I” is not “mine” to begin with. English speaks me.

I don’t reject the interior altogether. I mean it’s a mighty metaphor. “But I have that within that passes show / these but the trappings and the suits of woe.”

It’s more like Wittgenstein’s “pure realism” in the TLP. The subject is real. “Objectivity” is just ideal subjectivity. The “just” judge, not a mute camera.