Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Sculptor1]

It's a subjective sensory affection or passion that consists in a particular electrochemical process in a brain.

(By subjective affections or passions I don't just mean emotions but all sorts of experiential impressions, including sensations and imaginations.)

Yes, but how does that Electrochemical Process produce the Redness?

It doesn't produce the redness because it is (identical to) it: Certain (dynamic patterns of) electrochemical processes in your brain are your color experiences.

You have to be able to show HOW Redness is Electrochemical Processes in the Brain. Saying it does not Explain it. It's ok as a Speculation but it is not an Explanation.

There are no explantions; only descriptions.

[SteveKlinko]

CORRECTED QUOTE BOX:

QUOTE>
"The new Epiphenomenalism leaves the Mind-Body problem in a rather curious condition. It divides the problem into two parts, one soluble and the other insoluble. It reaches different conclusions on different aspects of mentality.
…
The central truth about minds is their causal role in behavior. With respect to all the causal aspects of the mind, the Mind-Body problem takes the form: What is the relation between human bodily activity and its mental cause? And the answer is as given in Central-State Materialism: bodily activity is caused by neurological changes in the central nervous system. The mind is part of the body. How changes in sense organs affect it, and how changes in it affect the muscles, become a painstaking matter of detailed scientific research which has no insoluble mystery attached to it.

But human mental life also embraces awareness by phenomenal properties. Such awareness is also, we must suppose, caused by changes in sense organs and brain. How this is done we do not know. Because the non-material seems to thwart our attempts to account for its operations, I suspect we will never know how the trick is worked. This part of the Mind-Body problem seems insoluble. This aspect of humanity seems destined to remain forver beyond our understanding.

So we reach a skeptical conclusion regarding one facet of the Mind-Body problem. Philosophers ought to dislike skeptical conclusions, but they should not like spurious escapes from them any better. We cannot guarantee in advance that the whole of human nature is open to human understanding."
(pp. 130-1)

"Epiphenomenalists must just accept, if they are to remain Epiphenomenalists, that the existence of nonmaterial properties is a fact for which they have no explanation. They may comfort themselves in this uncomfortable position with two reflections: the lack of explanation does not disprove the fact, and the existence of basic material properties of material things is something for which we equally have no explanation. Compared with Epiphenomenalism, Central-State Materialism embodies a single, simple, and universal vision of the world. But we should not be prepared to pay for tidiness of theory the price of denying some of the facts. Epiphenomenalism rests on the claim that not all facts about men's minds will fit into the materialist account. If that claim is correct, we will have to reconcile ourselves to an interpretation of evolution ary theory and embryonic development which is less smooth and unproblematic than we might wish."
(pp. 137-8)

(Campbell, Keith. Body and Mind. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.)
<QUOTE

I'm more Optimistic. If Conscious Experience is in the Neurons, then that's fine. But it has to be shown how this is true using a Chain of Logic. If Conscious Experience is not in the Neurons but is Connected to the Neurons, then that is equally fine. It also must be shown to be true with a Chain of Logic. I am operating with the assumption that there is a Chain of Logic out there yet to be discovered. Which Perspective will win is anybody's Guess. Everything is still on the table at this point.

[Faustus5]

We understand some of the general mechanisms that shape consciousness. It's like the Big Bang - being able to postulate knowing what happened in the first second after the Big Bang does not infer knowledge of what preceded and triggered it. As with analysis of neuronal dynamics, knowing what happens after the fact is essential information needed to understand the phenomenon in question, but does not provide solid answers.

I really don't understand what any of that is supposed to mean in practice. To my way of thinking, explaining conscious states just means tracing causal pathways between activities in a person's body that lead to them making reports of different kinds of subjective experiences, and understanding the functional roles those processes play.

But I must say I LOVED the point you made in a later post replying to someone else about how people underestimate the contributions of non-brain systems to cognition. That's really important. I first learned of that kind of thing back when some recipients of organ transplants reported drastic changes in temperament and preferences which sometimes mapped onto the traits of the people those organs came from. Fascinating stuff.

[Faustus5]

You may call it an article of faith, but I see no plausible and scientifically fruitful ontological alternative to central-state materialism (reductive materialism)—the view that all mental/experiential states are states of central nervous systems, and that they do not contain any properties (qualities) of a nonphysicochemical or physicochemically irreducible kind.

My only nitpick with any of that is my aversion to reductionism, but that may just be because I hold to a rather strict concept of what gets to count as successful reduction, one which makes most mental states irreducible. Not for reasons that are ultimately metaphysical or dualistic, just because of the way language works.

[Sy Borg]

We understand some of the general mechanisms that shape consciousness. It's like the Big Bang - being able to postulate knowing what happened in the first second after the Big Bang does not infer knowledge of what preceded and triggered it. As with analysis of neuronal dynamics, knowing what happens after the fact is essential information needed to understand the phenomenon in question, but does not provide solid answers.

I really don't understand what any of that is supposed to mean in practice. To my way of thinking, explaining conscious states just means tracing causal pathways between activities in a person's body that lead to them making reports of different kinds of subjective experiences, and understanding the functional roles those processes play.

But I must say I LOVED the point you made in a later post replying to someone else about how people underestimate the contributions of non-brain systems to cognition. That's really important. I first learned of that kind of thing back when some recipients of organ transplants reported drastic changes in temperament and preferences which sometimes mapped onto the traits of the people those organs came from. Fascinating stuff.

Sorry, that was probably a tad convoluted. tl:dr is that neuronal analysis is important, but perhaps not the be-all-and-end-all of consciousness studies, as per comments about the interaction between the nervous and other systems.

As one can expect, our studies have so far worked to simplify what is a hugely complex biological situation. So we study each organ in detail, almost as if they were closed systems. The most difficult and complex work still lies ahead - tracing, not just neuronal interactions, but the subtleties in the interactions between the CNS and metabolic systems. The brain by itself is complex enough, and the gut is highly complex as well, so the interactions between them are logically even harder to analyse. The challenge here is funding, given how neuroscience is the main grant magnet. Still, improved understanding of the microbiome and its health effects should lead to more studies of the systems' interactions rather than their individual qualities.

[Consul]

It doesn't produce the redness because it is (identical to) it: Certain (dynamic patterns of) electrochemical processes in your brain are your color experiences.

You have to be able to show HOW Redness is Electrochemical Processes in the Brain. Saying it does not Explain it. It's ok as a Speculation but it is not an Explanation.

QUOTE>
"Sensory Coding: Taste

On one’s tongue, there are four distinct kinds of chemically sensitive receptor cells. (There are recent indications of a fifth type, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll leave this aside.) Cells of each kind respond in their own peculiar way to any given substance that makes contact with them. A peach, for example, might have a substantial effect on one of the four kinds of receptor cell, a minimal effect on the second kind, and some intermediate level of effect on the third and fourth kinds. Taken altogether, this exact pattern of relative stimulations constitutes a sort of neural ‘fingerprint’ that is uniquely characteristic of peaches.

If we name the four kinds of cells a,b,c, and d, respectively, then we can describe exactly what that special fingerprint is, by specifying the four levels of neural stimulation that contact with a peach actually produces. If we use the letter S, with a suitable subscript, to represent each of the four levels of stimulation, then the following is what we want: <S_a , S_b, S_c, S_d> . This literal list of excitation levels is called a sensory coding vector (a vector is just an ordered list of numbers, or magnitudes). The important point is that there is evidently a unique coding vector for every humanly possible taste. Which is to say, any humanly possible taste sensation is just a pattern of stimulation levels across the four neural channels that convey news of these activity levels away from the mouth and to the rest of the brain.

We can graphically display any given taste by means of an appropriate point in a ‘taste-space’, a space with four axes, one each for the stimulation level in each of the four kinds of sensory taste cell. Figure 7.13 depicts a space in which the positions of the various tastes are located. (However, in this diagram, one of the four axes has been suppressed, since it is hard to draw a 4D space on a 2D page.) What is interesting immediately is that subjectively similar taste-sensations turn out to have very similar coding vectors. Or what is the same thing, their proprietary points in taste-space are very close together. You will notice that the various types of ‘sweet’ tastes all get coded in the upper regions of the space, while sundry ‘tart’ tastes appear in the lower center. Various ‘bitter’ tastes appear close to the origin of the space (the ‘bitter’ axis is the one we dropped), and ‘salty’ tastes reside in the region to the lower right. The other points in this space represent all of the other taste sensations it is possible for humans to have. Here there is definite encouragement for the identity theorist’s suggestion that any given sensation is simply identical with a set or pattern of spiking frequencies in the appropriate sensory brain area.

Sensory Coding: Color

A somewhat similar story appears to hold for color. There are three distinct types of color-coding neurons distributed uniformly throughout cortical area V4, just downstream from the primary visual cortex. These three types of cells are ultimately driven by the wavelength-sensitive cells in the retina, via a clever tug-of-war arrangement involving the axons between the two cell populations. (I’ll spare you the details.) Here also, a (three-dimensional) neuronal activation space, embedded in area V4, displays simultaneous activation-levels across those three types of cells for each small area of the visual field, an activation space for each of the possible colors perceivable by humans. Figure 7.14 portrays that space, and you will notice that it contains a special double-coned or spindle-shaped subvolume, within which all of the familiar objective colors are systematically placed according to their unique similarity (i.e., proximity) and dissimilarity (i.e., distance) relations to all of the other objective colors. Orange, for example, is tucked closely between red and yellow, as you would expect, while green is a maximal distance from red, as is blue from yellow, black from white, and so forth. This neuronal coding system recreates, in complete detail, the internal qualitative structure of human phenomenological color space, as displayed in introspection. One might even say that it explains it, especially since it predicts, with equal accuracy, the qualitative character of the many thousands of possible after images one can induce in the human visual system by temporarily fatiguing the neurons involved. Indeed, it even predicts the weird qualitative characters of certain unusual visual activation-vectors outside the central spindle of the familiar objective colors. That is, it correctly predicts the qualitative characters of sensations you have never even had before. Evidently, phenomenological qualia are not quite so inaccessible to physical theory as was originally advertised."

(Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. pp. 227-231)
<QUOTE

[Consul]

My only nitpick with any of that is my aversion to reductionism, but that may just be because I hold to a rather strict concept of what gets to count as successful reduction, one which makes most mental states irreducible. Not for reasons that are ultimately metaphysical or dualistic, just because of the way language works.

As I understand it, the reductionism involved in reductive materialism is strictly ontological. It doesn't claim that all scientific concepts or theories other than those used in physics are translatable into and replaceable by physical concepts or theories; and it doesn't claim either that all sciences other than physics are replaceable by physics.

There is a chemical meaning of "to reduce" = "to decompose (a compound); to resolve into a simpler compound or into the constituent elements" (Oxford Dictionary of English); and by saying that all mental phenomena are ontologically reducible to physical phenomena, I mean to say that they are mereologically decomposable into (lower-level) physical phenomena, because they are composed of (constituted by/constructed from) purely physical elements, such that certain systems of such elements are (identical with) mental phenomena.

So reductive materialism can as well be called compositive (compositional) materialism about mind and consciousness.

Another alternative label for the same view is equative materialism, because it equates (identifies) mental phenomena with purely physical systems.

[Consul]

There are no explantions; only descriptions.

Why? Please explain!

[Consul]

There are no explantions; only descriptions.

Why? Please explain!

"At some point one has to pass from explanation to mere description."
—L. Wittgenstein (On Certainty, §189)

This is different from saying that "there are no explanations"!

[Consul]

…So reductive materialism can as well be called compositive (compositional) materialism about mind and consciousness.
Another alternative label for the same view is equative materialism, because it equates (identifies) mental phenomena with purely physical systems.

However, according to materialism, matter is ontologically prior to and independent of mind; so there's an asymmetric relation between them. But there's nothing asymmetric about identity: If A = B, it doesn't follow that A is prior to and independent of B, or vice versa. Nor does identity imply anything about composition, which is an asymmetric relation: If A = B, this may be due to A being composed of B-elements and hence being a system of B-elements, or B being composed of A-elements and hence being a system of A-elements.

[Belindi]

Any phenomenon and all phenomena are experienced within perceptual frameworks. It's impossible to see red and not see a red something plus at least one other hue.

Perceptual frameworks suffice to explain qualia if you add in intentionality.

Intentionality is the word for how we live life towards the future however banal and trite our personal future may be we live our life towards it. In order to do so we need a perceptual framework. A perceptual framework is called a gestalt.

Please do let's not mystify qualia!

I disagree. Look at a Fire Truck, then at an Apple, then at a Stop Sign. These are all different things and when you are Looking at them they are in the context of many other things. But now Realize that there is a Property or Experience about all of these things that is created in your Mind. That is the Redness of these things. No larger Context or Framework necessary. The Redness is a thing in and of itself that needs to be Explained.

Redness is a quality (hue) and a quantity(intensity) that one abstracts from the totality of an experience. The varieties of quality one can abstract from any given experience depends on the richness or otherwise of the experience, organs of special sense, and learned complexity of relationships. The gestalt is primal and abstract qualities are subsequently learned or not as the case may be.

[Pattern-chaser]

Certain (dynamic patterns of) electrochemical processes in your brain are your color experiences.

You state this as a fact. I think it is what we all believe to be likely, although even that is misleading, because we have no way to assign a valid probability.

[The Beast]

As I try discerning among the different hues, I might encounter the judgement of why one hue is different and why is it better or worse. My empirical evidence could in fact disagree with the judgement (occasional) of the physical senses. I also have difficulties measuring the bad taste in the mouth. In some antithesis I could agree to pass the knowledge in stone the same way I stenciled the name of my mother on it. I feel the love coming from the cold stone. Maybe I will leave a rose.

[SteveKlinko]

It doesn't produce the redness because it is (identical to) it: Certain (dynamic patterns of) electrochemical processes in your brain are your color experiences.

You have to be able to show HOW Redness is Electrochemical Processes in the Brain. Saying it does not Explain it. It's ok as a Speculation but it is not an Explanation.

QUOTE>
"Sensory Coding: Taste

On one’s tongue, there are four distinct kinds of chemically sensitive receptor cells. (There are recent indications of a fifth type, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll leave this aside.) Cells of each kind respond in their own peculiar way to any given substance that makes contact with them. A peach, for example, might have a substantial effect on one of the four kinds of receptor cell, a minimal effect on the second kind, and some intermediate level of effect on the third and fourth kinds. Taken altogether, this exact pattern of relative stimulations constitutes a sort of neural ‘fingerprint’ that is uniquely characteristic of peaches.

If we name the four kinds of cells a,b,c, and d, respectively, then we can describe exactly what that special fingerprint is, by specifying the four levels of neural stimulation that contact with a peach actually produces. If we use the letter S, with a suitable subscript, to represent each of the four levels of stimulation, then the following is what we want: <S_a , S_b, S_c, S_d> . This literal list of excitation levels is called a sensory coding vector (a vector is just an ordered list of numbers, or magnitudes). The important point is that there is evidently a unique coding vector for every humanly possible taste. Which is to say, any humanly possible taste sensation is just a pattern of stimulation levels across the four neural channels that convey news of these activity levels away from the mouth and to the rest of the brain.

We can graphically display any given taste by means of an appropriate point in a ‘taste-space’, a space with four axes, one each for the stimulation level in each of the four kinds of sensory taste cell. Figure 7.13 depicts a space in which the positions of the various tastes are located. (However, in this diagram, one of the four axes has been suppressed, since it is hard to draw a 4D space on a 2D page.) What is interesting immediately is that subjectively similar taste-sensations turn out to have very similar coding vectors. Or what is the same thing, their proprietary points in taste-space are very close together. You will notice that the various types of ‘sweet’ tastes all get coded in the upper regions of the space, while sundry ‘tart’ tastes appear in the lower center. Various ‘bitter’ tastes appear close to the origin of the space (the ‘bitter’ axis is the one we dropped), and ‘salty’ tastes reside in the region to the lower right. The other points in this space represent all of the other taste sensations it is possible for humans to have. Here there is definite encouragement for the identity theorist’s suggestion that any given sensation is simply identical with a set or pattern of spiking frequencies in the appropriate sensory brain area.

Sensory Coding: Color

A somewhat similar story appears to hold for color. There are three distinct types of color-coding neurons distributed uniformly throughout cortical area V4, just downstream from the primary visual cortex. These three types of cells are ultimately driven by the wavelength-sensitive cells in the retina, via a clever tug-of-war arrangement involving the axons between the two cell populations. (I’ll spare you the details.) Here also, a (three-dimensional) neuronal activation space, embedded in area V4, displays simultaneous activation-levels across those three types of cells for each small area of the visual field, an activation space for each of the possible colors perceivable by humans. Figure 7.14 portrays that space, and you will notice that it contains a special double-coned or spindle-shaped subvolume, within which all of the familiar objective colors are systematically placed according to their unique similarity (i.e., proximity) and dissimilarity (i.e., distance) relations to all of the other objective colors. Orange, for example, is tucked closely between red and yellow, as you would expect, while green is a maximal distance from red, as is blue from yellow, black from white, and so forth. This neuronal coding system recreates, in complete detail, the internal qualitative structure of human phenomenological color space, as displayed in introspection. One might even say that it explains it, especially since it predicts, with equal accuracy, the qualitative character of the many thousands of possible after images one can induce in the human visual system by temporarily fatiguing the neurons involved. Indeed, it even predicts the weird qualitative characters of certain unusual visual activation-vectors outside the central spindle of the familiar objective colors. That is, it correctly predicts the qualitative characters of sensations you have never even had before. Evidently, phenomenological qualia are not quite so inaccessible to physical theory as was originally advertised."

(Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. pp. 227-231)
<QUOTE

Very good descriptions of the Taste and Color Brain Mechanisms. But these things have been known for many decades. These are the Neural Correlates of Taste and Color. These descriptions, although interesting and important when we are first trying to understand Taste and Color, are not Explanations of the Conscious Experiences themselves, even in an incremental way. It has been known for a hundred years that Neural Activity is related to Conscious Experience. Discovering more and more details about the Neural Activity does not help with solving the Hard Problem.

[SteveKlinko]

Any phenomenon and all phenomena are experienced within perceptual frameworks. It's impossible to see red and not see a red something plus at least one other hue.

Perceptual frameworks suffice to explain qualia if you add in intentionality.

Intentionality is the word for how we live life towards the future however banal and trite our personal future may be we live our life towards it. In order to do so we need a perceptual framework. A perceptual framework is called a gestalt.

Please do let's not mystify qualia!

I disagree. Look at a Fire Truck, then at an Apple, then at a Stop Sign. These are all different things and when you are Looking at them they are in the context of many other things. But now Realize that there is a Property or Experience about all of these things that is created in your Mind. That is the Redness of these things. No larger Context or Framework necessary. The Redness is a thing in and of itself that needs to be Explained.

Redness is a quality (hue) and a quantity(intensity) that one abstracts from the totality of an experience. The varieties of quality one can abstract from any given experience depends on the richness or otherwise of the experience, organs of special sense, and learned complexity of relationships. The gestalt is primal and abstract qualities are subsequently learned or not as the case may be.

I really don't know what you are trying to say. Redness is not complicated like you are describing. Redness is a Thing In Itself that exists in the Manifest Universe. It exists in your Mind, which is also a Thing that is in the Universe. We are at an Impasse.