Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

[Constance]

I'm claiming that I don't understand your position, and that imo many of your statements seem contradictory.

No, I'm not a phenomenologist. Yes, I've read many of the links that you and Smcder have provided. No, phenomenology cannot and will not solve the HP. Please, tell me what insights phenomenology has given us as to the ontology of consciousness. And/or tell me what insights practicing it has given you.

I haven't said phenomenology will "solve the HP." Like Chalmers, I see that the phenomenology of consciousness is an essential component of consciousness and constitutes the hard problem. It will be a significant part of an eventual comprehension of what consciousness is. I've asked before what you mean by 'ontology'. What do you mean here by "the ontology of consciousness"? An ontology of consciousness will be the last insight we arrive at when we have investigated consciousness to the extent possible, and at that point it might still only be a possible ontology.

And/or tell me what insights practicing it has given you.

I tried to do that recently. You said it was 'nice' but not enough. Since then I've posted poems by Wallace Stevens to help you grasp phenomenological insights presented in his phenomenological poetry. You misread the part I presented to you concerning the discovery of reflective consciousness operating in my own mind alongside the prereflective stream of consciousness within which I'd been engaging the world around me. Your misreading was that I experienced reflective consciousness once, but I'm sure I made it clear that once one gains the full sense of reflective consciousness it becomes a permanent addition to the way one's consciousness functions in the world. Read Merleau-Ponty. I've linked an online copy of the whole of his Phenomenology of Perception, which should begin to acquaint you with the nature of your own consciousness.

This is an internet forum. I'm not a philosopher nor a neurscientist. Yes, I have and will read books and articles on the subject. But if you can't give me the quick and dirty version, then so be it.

It's good that you will do the reading since a "quick and dirty version" of phenomenology is not possible or available.

As noted, phenomenology alone cannot tell us whether or not con is constitiuted of information or no.

Nor can information theory alone tell us whether or not consciousness is constituted of information. What we're doing here is 'multiplying our perspectives' on consciousness and the grounds -- research, thinking, source materials -- on which we've individually developed our own perspectives. That in itself, btw, is a phenomenologically developed method of gathering fuller knowledge of anything we want to understand.

Neurophenomenology. Ive articulated myself that 1st person investigation needs to be complimented by 3rd. Thats what neurophenom is. Its wonderful. Neurophenom seems compatible with IP. That is, phenomenal states appear to be correlated to brain states.

Your language is vague because your claims are vague: "compatible with", "correlated to." Tell us something we don't already know.

Brain states = information

.

A claim formerly made by Tononi. Certainly not a conclusion supported by the two sentences of yours that preceded it.

 

[Constance]

"The quick and dirty version:

The Odyssey: man gets lost for 20 yrs while his wife's suitors eat him out of house and home

Socrates: irritating little man proves no one knows what they are talking about and is put to death for it

Buddhism: sit down and try to make yourself go away

Christianity: Rabbi heals the sick, raises the dead and feeds multitudes ... forgives everyone, even God

The Renaissance: for irrational reasons, a bunch of dead white guys deify reason

Moby Dick: a man suffering from OCD and depression hunts a stupid whale who doesn't even know he exists

Relativity: E=mc^2

Phenomenology: sorry, no easy summary available"


Priceless.

 

[smcder]

The following will attempt to outline briefly where the two critiques converge. Neither critique attacks science's claim to be scientific. What phenomenology and Marxism criticize in the exact sciences is their claim to exclusiveness, which does not and cannot meet scientific requirements. Today's sciences fail to justify their existence : they have nothing to do with the meaning of human existence. Husserl formulates the question very sharply from the beginning: "Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.... In our vital need — so we are told — this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentious upheavals, finds the most burning : questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence.. .. Scientific, objective truth is exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact. But can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have a meaning if the sciences recognize as true only what is objectively established in this fashion, and if history has nothing more to teach us than that all the shapes of the spiritual world, all the conditions of life, ideals, norms upon which man relies, form and dissolve themselves like fleeting waves, that it always was and ever will be so, that again and again reason must turn into nonsense, and well-being into misery?"
Lukács emphasized this just as strongly: a science that merely discovers "facts" and seeks to determine the laws and structures of our world from these facts cannot guide our activities and actions. "A situation in which the 'facts' speak out unmistakably for or against a definite course of action has never existed, and neither can or will exist. The more conscientiously the facts are explored — in their isolation, i.e., in their unmediate relations — the less compellingly will they point in any one direction. It is self-evident that a merely subjective decision will be shattered by the pressure of uncomprehended facts acting automatically 'according to laws'."
Science can do no more than predict events to which we must adapt. In this sense, they are not a means to self-realization; they make us part of the "objective" world governed by the natural laws they have discovered: they make us objects of transcendence.
This failure of science to carry out the task of human knowledge, i.e., to give meaning to our existence, stems, according to both Husserl and Lukács, from the fact that science is unable to assume the
standpoint of the totality.

Science has been reduced to technique (techné), an art of manipulation that rules out meaningful and really human action in favor of limited calculation, since it does not approach human reality as a totality, but only as the sum of "particular facts" governed by "objective" laws. The loss of the totality means at the same time the abolition of historicity. "The unscientific nature of this seemingly so scientific method consists," says Lukács, "in its failure to see and take account of the historical character of the facts on which it is based."
Husserl formulates the same idea in positive terms. "This we seek to discern not from the outside, from facts, as if the temporal becoming in which we ourselves have evolved were merely an external causal series. Rather we seek to discern it from the inside. Only in this way can we, who not only have a spiritual heritage but have become what we are thoroughly and exclusively in a historical-spiritual manner, have a task which is truly our own. We obtain it ... only through a critical understanding of the total unity of history —
What science lacks is precisely this critical understanding of the total unity of our history.

 

[Pharoah]

I was wondering. What consequences can you draw from the following premises taken from the Knowledge Argument?

Premise P1 For Mary to experience colour would be for her to have knowledge as to what it feels like
Premise P2 Mary knows all physical facts about human color vision before her release.
Premise P3 On release Mary acquires knowledge of what colour experience feels like
Therefore

 

[Constance]

That's from Jackson's argument, right? Haven't we responded to this before, some months ago?

 

[Pharoah]

That's from Jackson's argument, right? Haven't we responded to this before, some months ago?

Well not exactly:

The usual formulation might go like this (c.f. SEP):

Premise P1 Mary has complete physical knowledge about human color vision before her release.
Therefore
Consequence C1 Mary knows all the physical facts about human color vision before her release.
Premise P2 There is some (kind of) knowledge concerning facts about human color vision that Mary does not have before her release.
Therefore (from (P2)):
Consequence C2 There are some facts about human color vision that Mary does not know before her release.
Therefore (from (C1) and (C2)):
Consequence C3 There are non-physical facts about human color vision.

This is the formulation, in reverse, I have asked for comment on:
Premise P1 For Mary to experience colour would be for her to have knowledge as to what it feels like
PremiseP2 Mary knows all physical facts about human color vision before her release.
Premise P3 On release Mary acquires knowledge of what colour experience feels like
Therefore
ConsequenceC1 Not all physical knowledge can be known as physical facts
ConsequenceC2 A complete physical knowledge entails the possession of propositional and non-propositional knowledge
Consequence C3 Mary did not previously possess a complete physical knowledge

 

[smcder]

Here is the post I made: Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3 | Page 14 | The Paracast Community Forums

And here was your response:


Yes, last time I got frustrated with the discussion involved me asking Constance to provide an overview of her conception of consciousness. She produced a post about quantum entanglement and increasing complexity, etc.

That's not the issue though. My issue is that the two of you seem to be searching for an explanation of something that you havent even defined. Maybe you think its unable to be defined? Who knows.

I don't understand your last answer in this exchange:

soupie That's not the issue though. My issue is that the two of you seem to be searching for an explanation of something that you havent even defined. Maybe you think its unable to be defined? Who knows.

smcder Why is that an issue for you? Or what is the issue, exactly?

soupie The issue is that we're all talking about — and seeking a different explanation for — a different part of the elephant

that last answer doesn't seem to match where you say:

My issue is that the two of you seem to be searching for an explanation of something that you havent even defined. Maybe you think its unable to be defined? Who knows.

My question is: even IF we were searching for an explanation of something that we haven't even defined ... why would that be an issue for you?

Your answer:

The issue is that we're all talking about — and seeking a different explanation for — a different part of the elephant.

Doesn't, to me, match.

 

[smcder]

@Pharoah
OK before I read your comments/responses - I want to read and respond to the referee's comments. Then I'll go back and look at your post above about how you read the comments and your response and respond to that. I do know you had probably better hew pretty close to any suggestions they make to get it published - but if you feel that compromises the integrity of the work ...

My other thought is what exactly is the right place to publish this work? How did you find this journal? You are outside a lot of traditional areas - like academic philosophy, although your goal may be to get it into one of those traditional journals - traditional or mainstream ... but your work seems to be cross disciplinary and "outside the academy" so to speak. I'm sure you've looked around trying to find a congenial publication.
1. Throughout, the author seems to conflate metaphysical and epistemological issues.

This is what I would expect - issues of terminology. Again, you may have responded to this above - but I'm working through this on my own first. Philosophy has a history and methods and terminology like any body of knowledge - academic journals that are published for the profession are going to insist on a particular vocabuary. Even if you want to challenge that vocabulary, you have to first master it - in order to communicate what you want to change ... to even get the professional philosopher's attention. If you are up in my house wanting to re-arrange the furniture, you better speak my language ... ;-)

On standard philosophical usage, however, the notion of a fact belongs to metaphysics while that of information is more closely aligned with epistemology. (In connection, Jackson’s shift from talk of “physical information” in his 1982 paper to “physical facts” in 1986 should be understood as a move meant to guarantee that his argument had metaphysical and not just epistemological import.) So, I’m not entirely sure
what the author means by the claim that all facts are informational.

*This is interesting and may be of interest to @Soupie as he looks at what information is.

Note the referee cites Jackson's change in usage to underscore this point. In the vocabulary of standard philosophical usage, your claim that all facts are informational translates to a claim of moving entities from one philosophical class to another and this causes him confusion:

Does it mean that we can possess information (where “possessing information” is something epistemic) about any fact (something metaphysical)? Does it mean that facts are mind-dependent in a way that blurs the metaphysics/epistemology distinction I’m suggesting (roughly: facts depend on information)? Does it mean something else?

Along similar lines, on p. 6, LL57-58, the author writes that “Facts are exclusively conceptual representations about physical reality…” But this is an idiosyncratic understanding of facts. More typically, facts are understood as worldly entities that are not (generally) representations at all, although they can be represented.

You do not want to have an "idiosyncratic" understanding when publishing in an academic journal. This is a polite way of saying "naive" - which in academic terms means you don't have the background in the subject matter - to avoid this you would want to first show that you do know the common usage and then make a claim for another understanding.

So you could say something like:

"Facts are typically understood as worldly entities that are not (generally) representations at all, although they can be represented. However, I will show that facts are exclusively conceptual representations about physical reality."

- continued in next post -

 

[smcder]

@Pharoah
-continued from last post-

So for instance, it’s a fact that the cat is on the mat, and this fact does not represent anything, but the (true)sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’ is a linguistic representation of this fact.

The author goes on to cite Lycan saying that true propositions correspond to facts, and that propositions are composed of (Fregean) concepts. But for Lycan (and others) correspondence is not identity, and so on Lycan's view, it’s not that facts themselves are composed of concepts, or are otherwise conceptual representations, as the author maintains.

Here the referee is just saying that you misunderstand Lycan. Is it possible you've taken Lycan's idea out of context?

There are several other instances of this sort of confusion throughout the paper, and until they are sorted out, theauthor’s argument is seriously undermined. After all, on one common view, THE KEY QUESTION about Jackson’s argument is whether Mary learns of a new fact when she leaves the room (a nonphysical fact) or whether she merely acquires a new representation of a fact (a physical fact) that she already knew, in the room, under a different representation.

2. On p. 7, LL46-48, the author writes, “It is surprisingly easy to illustrate that not all knowledge is conceptual; that not all knowledge gives rise to facts.” But in fact, this at least initially sounds deeply confused. After all, on the standard view, knowledge is roughly justified true belief. If knowledge requires belief, that seems to entail knowledge is always conceptual, if we assume that belief is a conceptual state in the sense that you can believe that P only if you possess concepts sufficient for grasping P. And if knowledge requires truth, that entails that knowledge is always factive, or in the author's terminology that knowledge always "gives rise" to facts

*(although I dislike the "gives rise" talk, since it suggests that facts depend on knowledge, which is backwards).

So, I have real doubts about the author's claims here, and about the claims on pp. 9-10 about a plant that has knowledge.
To help clarify the author's thoughts, I recommend engaging in detail with the "ability hypothesis," defended by Nemirow and Lewis among others, at this point in the paper. (The author mentions the hypothesis earlier on, but this is the point to deal with it at length.) For, if we assume a distinction between know-how (abilities) and propositional knowledge, I can start to see how a kind of knowledge (know-how) might fail to be conceptual, and how it might fail to "give rise" to facts. And maybe I can even start to see how a plant might have a kind of knowledge (know-how). But in that case, what I lose track of is whether the author is offering a genuine alternative to the ability hypothesis, or a promising way of fleshing out the hypothesis, or what.

That last paragraph is key - if that were a critique of a draft from my professor and I wanted an "A" in the class, I would heed. He seems to be offering terminology too, making a distinction between "know-how" and "knowledge" ...

*one other note about terminilogy in philosophy is that every day words like knowledge and facts have specific meanings, this happens in other fields of course, but maybe not as often. You may have to find a good source for this vocabulary and that might be in a textbook - not sure I can think of an online source ... Oxford maybe has a dictionary of philosophy? Again, might be tricky to run down the word you need.

OK ... I'll have a look at your comments next ... see if I was at all on the mark.

 

[Randall]

I've lost track of where the paranormal part of this discussion fits in. It seems to have trailed off someplace back in the second incarnation of this thread, and the phenomenologists seem to have boiled it all down to the idea that it's all in our heads.

 

[smcder]

INTERLUDE

Gimme that old time philosophy
Gimme that old time philosophy
Gimme that old time philosophy
It's good enough for me.

Topic for #109: Karl Jaspers’s Existentialism on Science vs. Philosophy | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

This is relevant in several ways I think to the discussion. In addition to defining consciousness we need to think about what kind of explanations we want.

@Pharoah as I understand it so far - HCT says why something like consciousness could come into being but pushes the hard problem into a dicussion of the noumenal. So to say HCT address the hard problem doesn't give me the kind of explanation I am looking for.

The hard problem, as Nagel formulated it, shows the absurdity of explaining the subjective objectively. That's what I've returned to lately and it has helped me stay a little clearer ... when I substitute the subjective for the consciousness, the hard problem seems to take on its full strength. Those who want a full physical explanation of consciousness will have to let go of the subjective entitrely, so Nagel argues because a physical explanation is necessarily objective.

"I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.

It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character.

For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory. While an account of the physical basis of mind must explain many things, this appears to be the most difficult. It is impossible to exclude the phenomenological features of experience from a reduction in the same way that one excludes the phenomenal features of an ordinary substance from a physical or chemical reduction of it—namely, by explaining them as effects on the minds of human observers.

If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable thatan objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view."

...

The subjective is by definition irreducible ... Perceptronium is one thing, but Subjectronium is strictly philosophical kryptonite, sisters and brothers.

 

[Pharoah]

@smcder.
Thanks for the comments about the comments. And I do so like straight talk! v helpful.
I have been reading up again on the abiliity hypothesis and trying to assimilate philosophical terms. I have opinions about the AH and can incorporate it... but I do not see it as necessary anymore than it would be necessary to incorporate any other theories really - on the face of it, HCT does seem to relate to AH. I could do an extensive wordy comparative analysis(? but why). Similarly, I do understand the referee's reservations about terms but from my understanding, there are opposing and much debated interpretatins of what these terms mean. Is there really a standard interpretation?
Interestingly, Searle says the most misused word in the history of philosophy is 'representation'... which either means a lot of philsophers are applying the word incorrectly (how it gets past the referee's beats me), or his understanding is a little idiosyncratic.
I have been reading up on SEP with regard facts, propositions, and information. Can't say I am any the wiser as to what standardisation could possibly be. I can but try...

At some point I will get on to the subjective nature of experience, Varela, Thompson et al... Redoing paper and getting something together on information first.
Btw, Lewis in "What experience Teaches" has an interesting take on parapsychology in relation to Knowedge Argument if anyone is interested.

 

[Constance]

@smcder, you've provided a lucid analysis of the philosophical issues raised by Pharoah's referee, which will no doubt help Pharoah and has also helped me a great deal in seeing why I find such difficulty in reading Pharoah's paper (and other of his writings) and comprehending what he is actually arguing. I want to comment further on several extracts from the referee's report and what you have added in clarifying the philosophical issues involved. First I want to respond to @ufology's post:

I've lost track of where the paranormal part of this discussion fits in. It seems to have trailed off someplace back in the second incarnation of this thread, and the phenomenologists seem to have boiled it all down to the idea that it's all in our heads.

Discussion of the paranormal in terms of consciousness has trailed off again and again in this three-part thread because we keep returning to what can be understood about consciousness in terms of ordinary experience. I agree that it is tiresome that we are taking so long to identify the presuppositions and consequent limits of different approaches to the effort to understand what consciousness is. I think we're coming close, though, to a point where we can identify and critique the presuppositions that stand in our way in this attempt to describe what consciousness is. We need to recognize (soon I hope) that we're engaged in a hermeneutic circle of interpretation, and that up to this point we are not engaging the evidence of anomalous conscious experiences and capacities because they have been ruled out of court by the major presupposition that currently dominates discourse in general -- i.e., that everything must be explainable, accountable, in objective terms. Phenomenological philosophy developed out of a critique of the reductiveness of objectivist thinking that became dominant in the late 19th century and continues to struggle against objectivism's failure to recognize the subjective nature of consciousness. Phenomenology does not attempt to erase the objective pole of subjective experience but to clarify that we have only partial access to objects {things}, and that we must multiply our perspectives on things in order to come as close as we can to understanding them. 'As close as we can' because we can never know things in themselves. Our entire engagement with the world in which we exist is a matter of interpretation, and our interpretation of what-is will never be complete from our position in what-is.

I think (as does Steve) that we need to bring the evidence of para-normal experience into the hermeneutic circle of our discussion of consciousness. Eventually, perhaps, we will succeed in doing that. Until we do our discussion in this thread is limited by presuppositions about consciousness and mind and their relationship to what is assumed in objectivist thinking to describe the whole of what-is, and which fails to do so.

ADDENDUM: In fact, @ufology, Steve has provided early in part 3 of this thread pages of material from Kelly and Kelly et al (Irreducible Mind: A Psychology for the Twenty-First Century) that lay the groundwork for incorporating psi, parapsychology, and paranormal experience as evidence required in an interpretation of consciousness. You might be impressed at last by surveying these major points provided in Irreducible Mind concerning what you are accustomed to referring to as "woo."

 

[Constance]

Interestingly, Searle says the most misused word in the history of philosophy is 'representation'... which either means a lot of philsophers are applying the word incorrectly (how it gets past the referee's beats me), or his understanding is a little idiosyncratic.

Searle is exactly right about this in my opinion. I've asked several times before what you mean by the term 'representation'. Use of the term 'representation' 'gets past the referees' to the extent that they themselves have bought into presuppositions that all we know and can know about the reality in which we exist amounts to mental 'representations'. In analytical philosophy these become 'concepts', and in information theory concepts are taken to be constituted by 'information' with which neurons in our brains constitute an idea about the nature of reality. Indeed, in information theory reality is constituted by 'information'. Thus we, in our existential experience of being and of the world's being, don't really need to be here in order to interpret the nature of what-is. We contribute nothing to what-is or its comprehension but are rather cogs in some kind of machine that produces the illusion of a world in which our minds and other minds that exist are also illusions. Thus we could as well be zombies and the world would not be different from what it is assumed/presumed to be. But we know that we are not zombies. At least some of us know that.

 

[Pharoah]

Well not exactly:

The usual formulation might go like this (c.f. SEP):

Premise P1 Mary has complete physical knowledge about human color vision before her release.
Therefore
Consequence C1 Mary knows all the physical facts about human color vision before her release.
Premise P2 There is some (kind of) knowledge concerning facts about human color vision that Mary does not have before her release.
Therefore (from (P2)):
Consequence C2 There are some facts about human color vision that Mary does not know before her release.
Therefore (from (C1) and (C2)):
Consequence C3 There are non-physical facts about human color vision.

This is the formulation, in reverse, I have asked for comment on:
Premise P1 For Mary to experience colour would be for her to have knowledge as to what it feels like
PremiseP2 Mary knows all physical facts about human color vision before her release.
Premise P3 On release Mary acquires knowledge of what colour experience feels like
Therefore
ConsequenceC1 Not all physical knowledge can be known as physical facts
ConsequenceC2 A complete physical knowledge entails the possession of propositional and non-propositional knowledge
Consequence C3 Mary did not previously possess a complete physical knowledge

the primary concern of epistemology is propositional knowledge
One view about facts is - to be a fact is to be a true proposition.
Another incompatible view is - facts are what make true propositions true.

What do these thoughts say about facts and their relation to epistemology, please?

 

[Constance]

the primary concern of epistemology is propositional knowledge
One view about facts is - to be a fact is to be a true proposition.
Another incompatible view is - facts are what make true propositions true.

What do these thoughts say about facts and their relation to epistemology, please?

As I see it, epistemology in analytical philosophy took a wrong turn in restricting knowledge to propositional knowledge. I think that when you are able to entertain this perspective, you will begin to get free of the interpretational box in which analytical training has enclosed you.

 

[Constance]

Well not exactly:

The usual formulation might go like this (c.f. SEP):

Premise P1 Mary has complete physical knowledge about human color vision before her release.
Therefore
Consequence C1 Mary knows all the physical facts about human color vision before her release.
Premise P2 There is some (kind of) knowledge concerning facts about human color vision that Mary does not have before her release.
Therefore (from (P2)):
Consequence C2 There are some facts about human color vision that Mary does not know before her release.
Therefore (from (C1) and (C2)):
Consequence C3 There are non-physical facts about human color vision.

This is the formulation, in reverse, I have asked for comment on:
Premise P1 For Mary to experience colour would be for her to have knowledge as to what it feels like
PremiseP2 Mary knows all physical facts about human color vision before her release.
Premise P3 On release Mary acquires knowledge of what colour experience feels like
Therefore
ConsequenceC1 Not all physical knowledge can be known as physical facts
ConsequenceC2 A complete physical knowledge entails the possession of propositional and non-propositional knowledge
Consequence C3 Mary did not previously possess a complete physical knowledge

Case in point re the box in which your thinking is constrained. I see that you are attempting to fit your increasingly phenomenological take on the Mary case in the new inverted syllogism you provided in that post. In my view, the first premise in the uninverted version was plainly in error:

"Premise P1 Mary has complete physical knowledge about human color vision before her release."

which needs to be filled in with what we know from Jackson's argument, thus:

'Premise P1 Mary has complete physical knowledge about human color vision before her release from an existence restricted to a black and white room.'

For any person equipped with any degree of color vision, that first proposition was/is absurd on the face of it. Thus the rest of the syllogism was gratuitous, unnecessary.

Now that you've inverted the syllogism to begin with a phenomenological premise, you need to contextualize your argument in terms of phenomenological philosophy or your analytically conditioned readers will have their horns out before you get further in your argument. And round the circle will go again.

 

[Pharoah]

Searle is exactly right about this in my opinion. I've asked several times before what you mean by the term 'representation'. Use of the term 'representation' 'gets past the referees' to the extent that they themselves have bought into presuppositions that all we know and can know about the reality in which we exist amounts to mental 'representations'. In analytical philosophy these become 'concepts', and in information theory concepts are taken to be constituted by 'information' with which neurons in our brains constitute an idea about the nature of reality. Indeed, in information theory reality is constituted by 'information'. Thus we, in our existential experience of being and of the world's being, don't really need to be here in order to interpret the nature of what-is. We contribute nothing to what-is or its comprehension but are rather cogs in some kind of machine that produces the illusion of a world in which our minds and other minds that exist are also illusions. Thus we could as well be zombies and the world would not be different from what it is assumed/presumed to be. But we know that we are not zombies. At least some of us know that.

Yep. I think I understand what philosophers mean with regard to representation as a mental conceptual thing - (not sure why representation is the most misused term however...) when I speak of representation and knowledge, I talk of it as a mental conceptual construction too. Additionally, I talk of representation and knowledge, of a kind that is not conceptual:
Phenomenal representation and knowledge is ineffable and cannot be analysed (it is irreducible - subjective - changing. we know what it is like). I think of it as being constituted not of 'fact' (but this is idiosyncratic!).
Physiological representation and knowledge is not even felt or experienced. And for this reason, nobody even thinks to analyse it!

I don't think this is complicated really @Constance . I grant you that it isn't the way philosophers use the terms and I do appreciate that philosophers anchor themselves to the norms. I don't know how to use that language to express HCT... I borrow the words and modify them. I could invent a whole load of new ones - a popular technique. But then you get questions like, what's a "construct"? Look at the IIT glossary... every term is redefined or invented often without explanation.

 

[Constance]

Topic for #109: Karl Jaspers’s Existentialism on Science vs. Philosophy | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

This is relevant in several ways I think to the discussion. In addition to defining consciousness we need to think about what kind of explanations we want. . . .

and I would add: what kind of explanations we need based on how we experience our existence in the world and think about it.

@Pharoah as I understand it so far - HCT says why something like consciousness could come into being but pushes the hard problem into a dicussion of the noumenal. So to say HCT address the hard problem doesn't give me the kind of explanation I am looking for.

The problem there being that the noumenal arises in the first place in our reflection on the phenomenal nature of our experience. We don't live in the noumenal, and none of the other conscious animals we encounter around us seem to do so either. We live in the nexus of our phenomenal experience and reflection upon it that leads to all the works of mind, including those that misconstrue experience and mind.

The subjective is by definition irreducible ... Perceptronium is one thing, but Subjectronium is strictly philosophical kryptonite, sisters and brothers.

Exactly why so many philosophers have avoided touching it.

 

[Pharoah]

Case in point re the box in which your thinking is constrained. I see that you are attempting to fit your increasingly phenomenological take on the Mary case in the new inverted syllogism you provided in that post. In my view, the first premise in the uninverted version was plainly in error:

"Premise P1 Mary has complete physical knowledge about human color vision before her release."

which needs to be filled in with what we know from Jackson's argument, thus:

'Premise P1 Mary has complete physical knowledge about human color vision before her release from an existence restricted to a black and white room.'

For any person equipped with any degree of color vision, that first proposition was absurd on the face of it. Thus the rest of the syllogism was gratuitous, unnecessary.

Now that you've inverted the syllogism to begin with a phenomenological premise, you need to contextualize your argument in terms of phenomenological philosophy or your analytically conditioned readers will have their horns out before you get further in your argument. And round the circle will go again.

Wow.

Constance you say, "the first premise in the uninverted version was plainly in error"
Perhaps you may be interested to read what the SEP "Knowledge Argument" says about this first premise. Apparently, no philosopher has questioned its validity.
I am glad you like my phenomenological premise 1 because it re-positions for an alternative materialist stance for the Knowledge Argument - but unfortunately, it does mean throw a cat in the pigeons as to what is 'fact' and what constitutes 'knowledge'
I would be interested in other suggested consequences to the premises.
The horns do come out. You are right.