An opinion piece about a definition of consciousness

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tmd_3DXbnC2YovDHuMslTs681lN-goSB0NqAv9N3EK0/edit?usp=drivesdk

by Trenthug • 7 months ago

3 7 7 months ago

docs.google.com

Trenthug3• 7 months ago

This document presents an opinion piece about a standardized/objective description of consciousness given in a definite manner.Its propositions might seem to share aspects with Karl Friston's hypothesis of brains as Bayesian inference machines , Wittgenstein's private language discussions and Tononi's usage of a complexity metric in Integrated Information Theory (IIT).

rhelz2• 7 months ago

:-( I really don't want to be negative here, but really, the essay gets off on the wrong foot almost immediately. Propositional knowledge, i.e. knowledge which is described by true/false statements, just cannot be conscious experience.

Jackson's thought experiment sets this up. Mary has lived her life entirely in a black and white room, has never seen any other colors. But she's put the time to good use: she has learned every true proposition about how the brain works, how it processes dolors, even detailed descriptions of the neural processes which give rise to the conscious experienced of color.

After this, somebody at long last brings red rose into the room. Question: has Mary learned anything? Answer, no. By hypothesis, she already knows every true proposition about her present experience of the rose.

But what she does have is a non-propositional conscious experience which she's never had before. This has to be the correct answer, because of the work of another Philosopher, Wilfred Sellars. His (in)famous essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" gives a knock-down argument that conscious experiences of things like color cannot have propositional content. They are not like sentences, they are more like rocks and trees, i.e. real objects, but they cannot be true or false, and therefore they cannot be propositions.

Alas, reading the essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is a journey that many start, but few finish :-( It is very definitely the hardest thing to understand that I ever read. But indeed, it does inescapably prove that proposition just can't be used to make conscious experiences.

__patchbit__2• 7 months ago

Mary should experience `blindsight' on encounter with the red rose having lived her life entirely in black and white.

rhelz2• 7 months ago

I don't understand, can you expand/explain?

Trenthug3• 6 months ago

Knowledge which is described by true false statements can not be conscious experience, true and the essay just says our subjective conscious experience is only a representation of the true/false statements experienced by us as a private language

Trenthug3• 6 months ago

And complexity of that subjective experience is what takes us towards a description of consciousness.

An opinion piece about a definition of consciousness

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