141–150 of 159 posts
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Are you claiming you know what it is like to be me? You can't know about the bat thing unless you know what it is like to be me.
I know you're a human, therefore I know you cannot know what it's like to be a bat, as an objective fact, regardless of how you think you think subjectively.
I have greater epistemic authority over what I know than others.
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I think the answer to your first question is mostly yes, because we know that when traveling in large swarms, many bats go quiet so they don't overwhelm the signal, yet they still manage to navigate fine.
Maybe they're just following the sound of the other bats directly, they way you would if you were blindfolded and told to walk with a group of people.
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I know you're a human, therefore I know you cannot know what it's like to be a bat, as an objective fact, regardless of how you think you think subjectively.
I am a human who objectively knows what it's like to be a bat. I have greater epistemic authority over what I know than others.
Sigh. Thinking you know and knowing is not the same, especially thinking you "objectively" know something. Maybe you should read the article posted instead of commenting these sorts of sentences.
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>But this isn't true! It has been repeatedly shown that patients without inner brain function react to stimuli (such as being pinched or pricked with a needle) by recoiling from the pain, as do babies with no experience of pain. Yes, reflexive avoidance behavior doesn't require conscious experience. But as the environment of the organism gets more complex, reflexive avoidance behavior isn't sufficient for competence.…
> But as the environment of the organism gets more complex, reflexive avoidance behavior isn't sufficient for competence. For an agent in a complex environment, competent damage avoidance requires engaging with negative valence as a cognitive entity to be planned around and weighed against other interests. This requires unification and consciousness. But why does engaging with negative valence, planning, and weighing…
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> The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this? This is definitely a possibility given the very basic level of understanding we have of this. The reality is that we don't know, and we don't even have a well defined way to know (that is, we don't even have any idea what kind of proof we would need to bring tha…
We don’t know, in the same way that we don’t know that there is no God… It’s far more likely than not that they do experience things.
I don't think this is a fair statement. I also happen to believe that there are no gods and that most animals have subjective experiences in some sense similar to our own (while I also believe that atoms and rocks don't), but I don't really think there is a meaningful probability you can associate with either position.
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You've completely left out the Hard Problem, though, and missed the essay's point. A large part of the essay is that we have plenty of objective knowledge about how bat sonar works, but we don't know what the subjective experience of sonar is like, and more importantly, knowing about the physical representation, whether in neuronal patterns or embeddings, doesn't get you closer to the subjective experience. tl;dr RGB…
No - he's right - it's all relative. Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color. Experimentally it's been shown that if a subject wears color goggle then initially everything will appear color tinted, but after a while normal color perception returns. The quale of "red" is not some absolute thing related to the wavelength (hence neural inputs) of red light.
You're getting memory mixed up with current experience. I think you mean to say that experience is based on the neural substrate associated with a color (mostly area V4 in human brains, which causes achromatopsia when damaged bilaterally).
(If memory is mandatory, then infants wouldn't see color when they first open their eyes, which seems unlikely. It also implies that cerebral achromatopsia would be impossible; but the damage that causes achromatopsia is in primary visual cortex, not memory areas.)
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But again, this misses the point. The RGB triplet is a fact known about the color, but knowing 100% of the facts of the representation does NOT tell you what it is like to experience red.
Consider a perfect future neuroscience lab that uses nanomachines to safely record every neuronal firing, every dendritic voltage shift, every synaptic cleft's neurotransmitter levels, all at microsecond precision, while showing you red circles. This lab knows everything about what your brain does in response to red stimuli. Everything EXCEPT the subjective experience of redness in the participants.
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> qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc. While I do believe this as well, I don't think there is any way to prove this with current knowledge. You can introspect and separate your experience of a color from your language, but this type of introspection can also be misleading. And that's about all you can do - we don't know of any way to objectively test if another organism…
Sure. We can't prove that other organisms experience qualia; we can only look at the effects of qualia (e.g. behaviors that are likely to be the product of emotions) and assume that an organism is therefore conscious. The real point, though, is that suggesting language gives rise to consciousness lacks any explanatory power as to why language should be accompanied by consciousness.
I thought the point above was in a similar vein - that qualia and language are theoretically separable phenomena, so that we can imagine a being might have qualia without language, or language without qualia, and so these need to be explained separately. I was trying to point out that we have no proof for the existence of beings that possess these two qualities separately, so that I don't think the theoretical distinction is necessarily true. Just like any volume of gas has a temperature and a pressure, the existence of separate concepts doesn't mean they are physically separable.
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We don’t know, in the same way that we don’t know that there is no God… It’s far more likely than not that they do experience things.
> It’s far more likely than not that they do experience things. I don't think this is a fair statement. I also happen to believe that there are no gods and that most animals have subjective experiences in some sense similar to our own (while I also believe that atoms and rocks don't ), but I don't really think there is a meaningful probability you can associate with either position.
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No - he's right - it's all relative. Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color. Experimentally it's been shown that if a subject wears color goggle then initially everything will appear color tinted, but after a while normal color perception returns. The quale of "red" is not some absolute thing related to the wavelength (hence neural inputs) of red light.
> Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color. You're getting memory mixed up with current experience. I think you mean to say that experience is based on the neural substrate associated with a color (mostly area V4 in human brains, which causes achromatopsia when damaged bilaterally). (If memory is mandatory, then infants wouldn't see color when they first open their eyes, which seems unlike…
RGB triplet has little to do with color vision since we don't have sensors for individual wavelengths - our color cones (most people have 3 types, but some have 4, allowing them to distinguish a lot of spectra that a normal person can't) all have broad gaussian responses and so all respond to all wavelengths, just with different spectral sensitivities.
An infant who first opens their eyes, or is exposed to new colors for the first time, is not going to have the same experience of color as later on, but necessarily there will still be some experience of "color" (e.g. a varying surface attribute, differing by the different neural inputs coming from the retina), but the subconscious associations will of course be different - something is not going to be perceived as "grass green" or "sky blue" until you have experienced those.
Of course you can never know the subjective experience of another person, let alone another animal, since while there will be a lot in common, dictated by brain architecture, it's also going to depend on individual experience. Our senses work by prediction, which is based on personal experience. If you look at a mid-game chess board you are not going to see the same thing as a grandmaster since they will be seeing positions and you will just be seeing pieces.
The real point is that the subjective experience of a color like red is not some absolute thing tied to the neural inputs for "red" (i.e. varying strengths of signal firing from your 3/4 wavelength sensors), since the experience is the same even when those inputs change - color constancy, goggle experiment, etc etc.
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The question is ultimately meaningless. All we have are actions and reactions, and brain scans. We can talk perfectly well based on that, although, it will be a bit cumbersome. All the qualia, subjective stuff etc. is just shorthand, for whta ultimately boils down to actions in the world.
That already presupposes a very narrow idea of what's meaningful that is quite far away from everyday life, where we talk about and evaluate subjective experiences all the time. How do we talk about ethics in terms of actions, reactions abd brain scans please? That looks like an uncovered check. In what sense are they a shorthand for actions in the world?