Fear of death.

There's a difference between experience and measurement, right? Ok maybe in the future you will be able to look into my brain and measure what I am experiencing, but that's not the same as actually experiencing it. That's what the old Mary the Neuroscientist story tries to demonstrate. You can know all there is to know about how the brain is responsible for the mind, exactly what kind of neurons wiggling in what kind of way are responsible for an experience of the colour red; but if you've never actually seen red yourself you're still missing out on something.

I think you can detect it but measuring implies a scalar aspect to awareness that doesn't seem right. you can measure numerical limits to things you can simultaneously be aware of and stuff like that.

ok but how do you feel about the measuring/detecting vs. experiencing distinction? i think you were one of the people upthread who had difficulty seeing why this is a problem, and i really want to figure out why!

it's not a problem in the sense that the observable world around you is essentially a black box anyway, so if you say that another human being is conscious, you're doing so on the basis of measurement/detection, so why not extend the same courtesy/suspicion to any other candidate for consciousness, including and especially oneself?

because i have a priviliged perspective on my own consciousness.

given how people routinely overestimate their perceptual and attentive abilities, wouldn't you give this perspective a bit less credence to compensate?

i feel like there's a whole bunch of concepts being smooshed together here. knowledge of one's own consciousness (infallible). knowledge of one's conscious abilities (e.g extent of visual field, colour discrimination etc) (of varying fallibility). knowledge of the nature of one's consciousness (if you have this you win philosophy).

does consciousness seem so much more mysterious than any other biological activity? really simple organisms have evolved to live in a world that's constituted by, say, light and whatever serves as sustenance for them, and they respond and act accordingly, in ways that we can pretty well understand. thinking through the very low-level basis for this is obv p difficult, but then it doesn't seem like a huge qualitative leap to say that when this is massively multiplied into a system that is embedded in its environment in as complex as the human body is then we're going to get some weird epiphenomena as a result.

look upthread for all that discussion. in short consciousness is qualitatively way way weirder than any other biological phenomenon.

imo

knowledge of one's own consciousness (infallible)
this seems particularly fallible with regards to memory -- at any given instant you can totally forget where you are where you're going etc, what you were thinking, just total brain fart.

but if at any point i think i am conscious i can't be wrong.

to some extent at every point you think "you are conscious" you're going to be wrong because there will be some aspect of consciousness not covered by that thought going on.

I think about the most accurate self-reportage one could ever say is, "I'm awake right now, mostly, sort of. Now I'm hungry"

i don't really see this assertion that consciousness is way weirder than other biological phenomena? even with really simple animals you have what appears to be some kind of unified system acting within a bigger environment in a way that can't really be explained in brute physical terms - biology's working on a different plane than physics and our modes of understanding how things function on those planes are kinda analytically irreconcilable. getting from that kind of apparently unified system to the apparently unified system that is consciousness (both unified systems that, for as unified and stable as they seem, are always on the brink of being blown to pieces) seems like a huge leap but in a specific direction, rather into some new territory entirely.

xxp isn't that a bit like saying "calling a tree green will always be wrong because there will be some aspect of the tree that isn't green?" ok consciousness is a complex multifacted phenomenon that we can't even propery describe but i don't see what's wrong in using a loose, general term for the whole thing in that way.

consciousness is subjective, private, phenomenal. nothing else in biology or any other science is like that.

what I mean is if people were accurate at apprehending their internal
mental states then a lot of therapists would be out of a job.

Basically if you think you're conscious at any given moment, a second opinion couldn't hurt.

it would be a bit of a hammer blow to find out one wasn't.

"sorry you're a robot didn't you know"

^ robotist

i think the really fundamental characteristics of consciousness would hold for me as much if i were a leech as they do now as a human! that which seems specifically human, or human in a hugely amplified way compared to everything else, it doesn't seem hard (well, HARD, but not implausible) to extrapolate how that would emerge from a hugely complicated and dense form of a biological system.

i think the really fundamental characteristics of consciousness would hold for me as much if i were a leech as they do now as a human!

i agree.

consciousness is subjective, private, phenomenal. nothing else in biology or any other science is like that.

― Autumnal the faun (ledge), Friday, September 28, 2012 6:33 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This strikes me as being not correct. Time is pretty subjective! We can make clocks run more slowly just by putting them on airplanes!

so how does this all apply to horse_ebooks

xp different usage of subjective i daresay. clocks don't experience anything.

Does a leech have an afterlife?

xp well now you're question-begging.

Merdeyeux you're saying that we're a complicated organism so our consciousness is more complex, though not functioning differently than the varying degrees found elsewhere in biological life?
I don't know if you saw my supercomputer scenario I presented that touches on the same point. If it is advanced enough to cross the line into arguably being conscious, is it not still a computer that that consciousness is tethered to only when it is operating?

Granny thanks for explaining everything much clearer than I suspect I have this whole time.

xxp what question? how? maybe clocks have experience? yeah ok but not according to science.

If i've learned one thing it's that getting across the precise nature of what it is about consciousness that is left unexplained by science to someone who doesn't share the intuition is remarkably difficult. If I say "subjective" you bring up clocks, although that just seems like a standard physical phenomenon to me - if I turn up the gas on my cooker the pan gets hotter, is that subjective? If I say "inaccessible" you would talk about brain scans etc. Maybe "phenomenal" captures it best. Science doesn't explain the "what it is like" aspect of consciousness.

Maybe though you're disproportionately valuing it because you personally experience it.

consciousness is subjective, private, phenomenal. nothing else in biology or any other science is like that.

Even if this is true, why does that mean it operates according to different rules? It's hard to pin down, hard to measure, different from all other natural phenomena...so it must be different in virtually every way from everything else? Why? For any phenomenon that is unique in one respect, can we assume it is unique in any other respect without evidence?

i only assume it's unique in those respects in which it seems unique. and many things in science operate according to different rules (electrons behave differently from quarks which behave differently from planets which behave differently from populations).

Maybe since it is unique in those respects, it shouldn't even be viewed as a distinct natural phenomenon. Rather than rewrite the rules just for it so it fits amongst the other members of a category, maybe it shouldn't be considered as within that category.
Also, it isn't as if in 1746, someone discovered the phenomenon of consciousness, and after testing it discovered it was subjective, making it unique. It's a term created specifically TO describe the subjective. It can't be measured BECAUSE it is subjective. It doesn't exist in objective reality, but is an effect produced by a ridiculously complex set of biological structured and reactions that is only observable by the organism that is housing those structures and reactions.

I would agree with most of the second para! But I'm still all for rewriting the rules. What is it if it's not a natural phenomenon?

The color red doesn't objectively exist either. It's a subjective experience, the effect produced by a certain wavelength of life interacting with a person's biology. An organism's way of interpreting information that exists outside of itself.

yup. but it's a phenomenon, it's natural, it exists.

No, those wavelengths exist. The color red does not. How can it if other organisms don't even experience it? Hell, color blind people don't even!

this is the hardcore dennett stance i guess. i don't get it.

well otherwise you'd have to say that humans way of experiencing external stimuli is the one correct one. spiders, bats, those dudes got it all wrong. right?

nope. we're just talking about existence, where does correctness come into it?

Sorry to veer away from the topic at hand... I thought this was interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lF-uMIfL6s

He argues that we shouldn't be afraid of death. The argument is,

1. We should be afraid of something (we have reason to be afraid of something) just in case (a) the thing is bad, (b) there's a non-negligible chance of it happening, and (c) there's some uncertainty about whether it will happen or how bad it will be.

2. Death is certain, and although we can be uncertain about how bad or painful the way in which we die may be, there's no uncertainty about how bad being dead will be (it won't be like anything.)

3. So, we shouldn't fear being dead.

I guess 1.c is the most tenuous condition here. He makes a case that this is how we ordinarily understand fear. We consider it inappropriate if someone expresses fear (as opposed to anger or sadness) about something that she knows will happen and knows how bad it will be.

Maybe the problem is that "fear" suggests too weak an emotional response, something like worry. Maybe the sort of fear that we sometimes feel concerning death is more like horror. I don't have any intuitions about whether horror is inappropriate towards something that I know is inevitable.

where does correctness come into it?

In thinking that "red" is natural, that it exists. We get tricked into thinking it does. It's the only way we experience those light waves, so that must be how it objectively exists. I'm color blind for certain colors. I'm pretty sure I perceive those colors differently. Now, I still do perceive those wavelengths. I don't see a blackness where they should be. The phenomenon of red doesn't exist out there, just within the brain.

Does heat exist? Do all organisms experience it in the same way? Particles moving at slower or faster rates, energy being transferred, that exists. Heat is a subjective experience of that.

The phenomenon of red doesn't exist out there, just within the brain.

yeah, but it exists.

Does heat exist? Do all organisms experience it in the same way?

like the old "hey man what if we all experience colours differently?" - what if we do? there's no right or wrong involved. doesn't mean our experience don't exist.

It exists as a subjective experience, sure. Does the subjective experience of red break any known physical laws? Why would consciousness, also a subjective experience (albeit a sort of meta experience; the experience of experiencing) be any different?

I'm saying the physical laws we have or can envisage are insufficient to explain consciousness - or indeed the mere perception of red. does that mean it breaks physical laws? hmm i suppose on one reading it does, not really what i'm aiming for though.

doesn't mean our experience don't exist.

it means they don't exist outside of ourselves. just like photosynthesis doesn't exist outside of a plants' cells. what does a plant experience when it photosynthesizes? unknowable, but no reason to think its experience of it is "special" with respect to the laws of physics.

Does the subjective experience of red break any known physical laws?

Not sure this is a answerable question.