Emphasizing The Connection Perspective

He just says he rejects the Hard Problem with no Explanation.
Which is exactly the same as you claiming there is a Hard Problem with no explanation. I don't like repeating myself, but here goes, I don't reject anything. Pay attention to what I'm not responding to. I'm not answering your question, because it's poorly formed and you started berating people when they engaged you with anything but full acceptance of all of your premises.

I’m not going to start explaining things to someone who is interested in dialog.

Lausten: He just says he rejects the Hard Problem with no Explanation.
Which is exactly the same as you claiming there is a Hard Problem with no explanation. I don’t like repeating myself, but here goes, I don’t reject anything. Pay attention to what I’m not responding to. I’m not answering your question, because it’s poorly formed and you started berating people when they engaged you with anything but full acceptance of all of your premises.

I’m not going to start explaining things to someone who is interested in dialog.

I’m not claiming there is a Hard Problem out of thin air. Go to a Library, Google it. The Hard Problem is not my creation. It is an established Philosophical concept that needs no explanation from me. You are the one that has the secret knowledge about why the Hard Problem does not exist. It is up to you to Explain why it does not exist.

 

I’ve already given you my take on why your precious Hard Problem does not exist. I offered you the knowledge, hence it is not a secret knowledge. Few may know of it, but hey, I can only offer. The “Hard Problem” comes from one guy’s initial description of it. He granted that there were a lot of mental activities, which would be (relatively) Easy for science to eventually explain. But he said that the Hard Problem could never be explained. The Hard Problem was having to do with the experience of qualia. But if, as I propose, if each experience of qualia is ALSO a behavior, THEN it can be scientifically explained, THUS there is NO HARD PROBLEM.

Daniel Dennett’s rejection of the Hard Problem is different in form. I’ll look for a link.

 

Oh my. I am having a conscious experience of redness. I looked at a plastic bag with red print on it. Now I am visualizing a completely red environment. A red room, with floating red balloons, held in place by red ribbon, and roses without greenery in red vases on red podiums. Little people who are dressed all in red, with all visible extremities painted red, wander about quietly. Oh the redness of it all. And blue jays flitter about, only they are not blue, but redder than the reddest cardinal.

 

 

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25289

Dennett nominated the Hard Problem for retirement five years ago.

You are the one that has the secret knowledge about why the Hard Problem does not exist. It is up to you to Explain why it does not exist.
I went looking for information on this "Connection Perspective", and for a moment I thought maybe you were talking about something that's out there in philosophy. Then I went to page 2 of the Google search and the well went dry. Back on the first hit, there's Steve, with the same essay on the Philosophy Now forum, until about page 4, where suddenly he's 'no longer participating'. And, a webpage all about this idea, written by Steve. I don't have time to critique every philosopher on the web.

We like to keep it wild and crazy here, but I know the mods, and they have limits. For the 3rd time, I don’t reject anything. I could talk all day about the Hard Problem of Consciousness, but not with someone who keeps ignoring what I say and makes up stuff about “secret knowledge”.

For a behavior to occur, you need an at least somewhat functional organism and you need the context of or the stimuli within a given environment.

So we have Jake. The 19 yr old color blind guy who for the 1st time looked thru special glasses and saw red. Before the glasses the 2 dozen red balloons were a bland brownish hue. When he was able for the 1st time to see them as red, neurological responses took place that were correlates to his experience of seeing red, including and along with any coexisting emotional responses – all of which are behaviors. (Before the glasses, Jake lacked the perceptual equipment, which other organisms of his species tend to have, in order to experience redness.)

It’s the same as with the so called “easy” problems of other mental based behaviors. e.g., I count and make a mental note of the number of balloons. That was a behavior of thinking. That had its own neurological correlates. It is the same as with any so called Hard Problems which are not hard problems, at all, just other mental based behaviors.

TimB: For a behavior to occur, you need an at least somewhat functional organism and you need the context of or the stimuli within a given environment.

So we have Jake. The 19 yr old color blind guy who for the 1st time looked thru special glasses and saw red. Before the glasses the 2 dozen red balloons were a bland brownish hue. When he was able for the 1st time to see them as red, neurological responses took place that were correlates to his experience of seeing red, including and along with any coexisting emotional responses — all of which are behaviors. (Before the glasses, Jake lacked the perceptual equipment, which other organisms of his species tend to have, in order to experience redness.)

It’s the same as with the so called “easy” problems of other mental based behaviors. e.g., I count and make a mental note of the number of balloons. That was a behavior of thinking. That had its own neurological correlates. It is the same as with any so called Hard Problems which are not hard problems, at all, just other mental based behaviors.

 

Your problem is that you are confusing Behaviors and Experiences. Your argument from Behavior rings hollow when you consider an actual Experience like Redness. Redness has nothing to do with Behavior. Redness is an Experience. You say I’m not listening to what you are saying, when the problem is that what you are saying is completely incoherent.

TimB said,

But knowing that there were colors he did not see, cannot compare with actually seeing them. He subsequently had a 1st hand concept of redness. Because he was able, at last, to engage in the behavior of “seeing something that is red”.


Very much so. Colors do not exist at all outside our brains. All that comes in through the senses are wave frequencies. The brain interprets the frequencies in a comparative manner (relativity?) and forms an internal holographic image of experiential emotions.

Our brain-in-a vat creates what we see, and that holographic creation (perception) is basically a “best guess” based on experience.

Write, that full process of “perceiving” and “best-guessing” (so to speak) and thus “seeing” and being aware of “seeing” the color red, is what I am suggesting is the mental behavior (complete with neurological correlates firing) of “experiencing red”.

But back to Jake (a real person) he saw the bright colors for the 1st time, immediately upon donning the special glasses. All that brain processing of light wave approximations, etc., may have occurred but for Jake he saw the colors, including red. My key point being that his seeing the colors was a mental behavior. (In Jake’s case he required some adaptive equipment in order to do that behavior.)

Steven, the hypothesis re: Consciousness that I have been touching on, is quite coherent. It is you that is having difficulty with the terms “Behavior” and “Experiences”. I am suggesting that Experiencing something IS a behavior - a mental behavior that occurs on a neurological level. You say “Redness is an Experience”. Now who is incoherent? You say “Redness has nothing to do with Behavior”. But if one sees something red, that is a perceptual behavior. If one says to oneself “That is a beautiful red apple.” then he is engaging in thinking behavior and simultaneously perceiving and being aware of perceiving the apple. There are an infinite # of possible behaviors that could involve the color red.

 

Come to think of it, the term “qualia” seems rather useless, to me.

Can we ask if “empathy” is a related emotion. The same electro-chemical response to watching someone actually performing some task. To be able to anticipate someone’s action by mere bodylanguage.

Or for two people experiencing the same emotion while watching something tragic, or cute, or painful , or delightful. The crowd at a football game feeling the “moment” and breaking out in cheering in concert.

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position.[1] Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of emotional states. Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and somatic empathy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

IMO, this is due to the basic similarity in brain’s physically hardwired processing structure with subtle differences in personal emotional interpretations from associative experiences and memories.

Emotions of all sorts are basically respondent behaviors. i.e., behaviors that are elicited by stimuli. (Emotions are wired in. We don’t have to learn to feel emotions. It happens automatically. We can learn to name, and identify many different emotions. We can learn when we are likely to respond emotionally to what and when. We can learn ways to adaptively deal with the emotions. But the emotions themselves just happen in response to stimuli.

If I happen to experience the same emotion while watching something tragic, or cute, or painful , or delightful, as another person feels while watching the same thing, it is still just my emotional behavior that I am covertly exhibiting. If I hear a person who is in pain, I may have empathic behaviors. One of which could be “imagining” what that person’s pain feels like. This could be enhanced by my remembering a time that I had an injury that might elicit a similar pain. Anyway, all behaviors.

TimB: Steven, the hypothesis re: Consciousness that I have been touching on, is quite coherent. It is you that is having difficulty with the terms “Behavior” and “Experiences”. I am suggesting that Experiencing something IS a behavior – a mental behavior that occurs on a neurological level. You say “Redness is an Experience”. Now who is incoherent? You say “Redness has nothing to do with Behavior”. But if one sees something red, that is a perceptual behavior. If one says to oneself “That is a beautiful red apple.” then he is engaging in thinking behavior and simultaneously perceiving and being aware of perceiving the apple. There are an infinite # of possible behaviors that could involve the color red.

Ok, now I see what you are saying. You are saying that the Neural Activity is the Behavior. Ok let’s define Behavior that way. Where you are getting confused is that you are saying, without justification, that then the Experience is the same thing as the Neural Activity. Usually Physicalists just say it directly: The Experience of Redness is the Neural Activity for Redness. It is a type of material Oneness belief that everything is Material, paralleling the New agers Consciousness Oneness belief that everything is Consciousness. But you are wrapping the thing up in another unnecessary layer by throwing the term Behavior into the mix. The statement that the Experience is the Neural Activity is however just as Incoherent. Like I said in the OP Science has tried to assume this for a hundred years and they have absolutely Zero understanding of how this could be true. The Neural Activity is merely the Neural Correlate of the Conscious Experience. It is not logical to assume that the Neural Activity is the Conscious Experience. That would be a Speculation not a proven fact of reality. It could be true but that has not been shown by anyone yet. The Connection Speculation is just as valid as your Oneness Speculation.

Steven said, “…The Neural Activity is merely the Neural Correlate of the Conscious Experience. It is not logical to assume that the Neural Activity is the Conscious Experience…”

That is all wrong. 1st off, the neural activity (aka, the neural correlate) is ALSO the Conscious Experience (the “conscious experience” being whatever composite of mental behaviors are in play for that period of being conscious.) Secondly, it is indeed logical to consider that neural activity itself IS the conscious experience.

Consider this: We know that all physical behaviors have neurological correlates. (All mental behaviors have neurological correlates, also.)

We know that we can generate neurological correlates that are quite similar to the neurological coordinates of a given behavior, by imagining doing that behavior.

There would be tremendous value in recognizing that consciousness, awareness, perception, are simply various mental behaviors. The most important, ultimately, I think, would be the fact that there are established rules of behavior. An understanding of consciousness, I think, would expand tremendously with this paradigm.

TimB: That is all wrong. 1st off, the neural activity (aka, the neural correlate) is ALSO the Conscious Experience (the “conscious experience” being whatever composite of mental behaviors are in play for that period of being conscious.) Secondly, it is indeed logical to consider that neural activity itself IS the conscious experience.

It’s not really logical to think that the Neural Activity IS the Conscious Experience. This is most evident if you think about something like the Experience of Redness. Neural Activity is a type of Phenomenon and the Experience of Redness is another totally different type of Phenomenon. It boggles the mind to grapple with these two disparate types of Phenomenon and logically conclude they are the same thing. It is more logical, especially at this infantile stage of our understanding of Conscious Experience, to just admit that the Experience of Redness is something so vastly different than Neural Activity that initially they should be conceptually separated. The research goal will then be to figure out (the Hard Problem) how it is that these diverse Phenomena are Connected to each other. This might be a Neural Activity process Connection, or an actual new type of Conceptual Connection from the Neural Activity Domain to the Conscious Experience Domain. If the Connection can be found to exist solely in the Neurons as some kind of yet to be discovered Process then that’s fine. However assuming it’s in the Neurons is not fine. It would be a pure Speculation when you consider the completely different Nature of the two Phenomena.

 

TimB: Consider this: We know that all physical behaviors have neurological correlates. (All mental behaviors have neurological correlates, also.)

From this I think you are saying that the Experience of something like Redness is a Behavior that has a Correlated Neural Activity. But I thought you said earlier that the Neural Activity was the Behavior. I don’t yet see how calling things Behaviors, that are already well defined in other ways, helps get us closer to understanding the Consciousness problem. But since Science has Zero understanding of Consciousness, everything is still on the table and you could be right.

You said “Neural Activity is a type of Phenomenon and the Experience of Redness is another totally different type of Phenomenon.”

What is this mysterious “Experience of Redness”? How does it differ from “seeing the color red” or from “visualizing something red, or imagining something red” (all of which would have neurological correlates)? Is it something about feelings mixed in? Feelings are behaviors too, you know, they are typically respondent (unconditioned and sometimes conditioned).

The benefit of understanding these things as behaviors, is that we know the rules of behavior. Behavior is functional. So we can come to a better understanding of the relevant controlling stimuli. We can have better descriptions of what is going on and why. We will have better opportunities to predict and even change behavior if we have a realistic model rather than something mysterious and inexplicable.

Let me balance out you comment that I could be right. I could also be wrong, but I don’t think so.

Re: The neural correlates of a mental behavior being the same thing as the mental behavior.

Consider the neural correlates of a physical behavior (let’s say tapping your foot). With the tap of your foot, there are neural correlates. The neural correlates are not the entire behavior, but they are definitely a requisite part of the behavior.

With consciousness behaviors, the neural correlates happen simultaneously with the subjective experiencing. So in this case, the behavior is a composite of the neural correlates (which can potentially be crudely detected with existing technologies) on the one hand, and on the other hand, the subjective experience which cannot be, outwardly, directly, detected.

 

 

TimB: You said “Neural Activity is a type of Phenomenon and the Experience of Redness is another totally different type of Phenomenon.”
What is this mysterious “Experience of Redness”? How does it differ from “seeing the color red” or from “visualizing something red, or imagining something red” (all of which would have neurological correlates)? Is it something about feelings mixed in? Feelings are behaviors too, you know, they are typically respondent (unconditioned and sometimes conditioned).

When we See Redness we are Experiencing Redness. No added emotion or anything else. Just the Redness itself. Redness is a thing in itself that must be Explained. Think about the Redness itself. Don’t ignore the thing itself by calling it a Behavior. The Redness itself is very Mysterious. The Redness itself is the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

I suppose you will also say that things like the Standard A Tone, the Salty Taste, and the feeling of Pain are Behaviors. I think that Conscious Experiences can elicit Behaviors, but to say that the Conscious Experiences themselves are Behaviors is Incoherent and rings hollow to me.

Again, redness, tones, saltiness are not behaviors. Mentally experiencing those things are the behaviors.

You say “Redness is a thing in itself that must be Explained… The Redness itself is very Mysterious.”

For whatever reason our neurology and eyes allow us to perceive colors. So yes perceiving is a behavior. Tasting, seeing, hearing, feeling pain are perception behaviors.

I don’t get why “redness” is supposedly some mysterious, inexplicable thing. We perceive colors due to different light waves (maybe with a little xtra brain processing to present an interpretation of the particular light waves that go with the particular color of a thing as Write4U suggested).