Good read on consciousness

[The Grand Nudger]

In the manner that I think you've been asking - it very literally doesn't.  It doesn't do anything like the thing we report.

We report how? What is leading to these vivid "first-person-perspective" reports?

Again, in the manner that I think you're asking, nothing.  That's not what they are any more than a memory of being terrified by a ghost is an accurate report of consciously experiencing what it's like to see a ghost.  

That's a problem with illusionism, not a problem with my position on how absurd illusionism is. The experience is real, it's not asserted. It may not be demonstrable to other beings, but it is experienced by the experiencer nevertheless. If illusionists nevertheless say this is all assertions, then I really don't know what else to say to them.

You're back to the meaningless sense of real again.  In illusionism, there is also a real thing going on, just not the thing that it reports itself as.  It says, "I have these qualities" - but does not.

I'd ask how he would know that consciousness is a different kind of substance as opposed to, say, aspect/property or whatever else it may be? Saying that one knows the nature of what one experiences should not be seen at the same level as knowing what one experiences. The former is debatable at least.

No one is saying "access consciousness" isn't possible or even actual. So of course if that's what you mean, then yes, of course there's going to be observational data and experimental support behind illusionism. But it nevertheless denies the existence of that which is clearly demonstrable to at least some beings in the first-person-perspective, even if it's not demonstrable to others in a non-first-person-perspective. 

What is clearly demonstrable, qualia?  That would  surprise the shit out of -everyone- in tom.  Well, okay, in what way is your first person experience different than a cameras first person experience?

If there's no experiencer, then there's no experience being experienced by the non-existing experiencer. Obviously.

But since experiencers experiencing experiences exist, then their experiences exist [as experiences].

You're being too hasty.  Even if first person experiencers did exist, that would not certify all of their assertions about first person experience.  They could still be reporting having first person experiences that they do not, in fact, possess.  In that completely non-hypothetical case, we find ourselves in the position of saying that even though the assertions can be and sometimes are false, we take them to be informative of some true state in other respects for reasons that we cannot articulate and in the absence of any demonstration to that effect.

I still vividly see words on the screen. But apparently, according to illusionists, I am not.

I felt intense pain last week due to tooth cavity, but apparently, I didn't really experience that pain.

Amazing ...

Not amazing, but correct, yes.  You really do possess a report of p-pain, but you really do not possess that quality.

In answer to your last question, the report of the experience and the experience itself are intertwined; they're one and the same.

And I don't know if this is very related to what you're saying here, but as Galen Strawson argued in the article I linked to previously, if you were hypnotized into experiencing pain (even though you suffered no body damage), you would still be experiencing pain.

If an organism were compelled to believe that it were in pain, it would believe that it was in pain. That's exactly what they think is happening.  

No, I absolutely don't lean towards emergentism because I lean towards the idea that "the mind" in a very fundamental sense exists at the elemental level. Therefore, if some parts of the whole possess at the "elements" of the mind, then the whole having the mind means the mind isn't an emergent property. Anyhow, perhaps what I described is more aptly labeled panprotopsychism as opposed to panpsychism, but it's basically the same thing as far as I'm concerned. Also, keep in mind there's variants of panpsychism, and not all panpsychists say that all things have a mind or mind-alike (if not all, then the fundamental stuff at least, like electrons and quarks and such).

We don'tt have to argue about everything.

Panpsychism is the view that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality. The word itself was coined by the Italian philosopher Francesco Patrizi in the sixteenth century, and derives from the two Greek words pan (all) and psyche (soul or mind).

I don't know what you mean by "perspective" then? Cameras, as far as I know, don't have perspectives of their own (the way I understand perspective). Cameras do help in enhancing ours, however.

But yes, it would be interesting if they did.

-and that's the rub.  A and P content appear to be dissociable, if any part of it is real then there's a real distinction between the two.  If you don't know what I mean by that, then how are -you- dissociating a from p content?  A camera has an a-perspective because the manner of it's instantiation (or substantiation in the world) leads to a specific and constrained field of view.  Some cameras even have attention schemas - mechanisms whereby, with no help from any mind, they attend to a particular portion of their field of view or  seek out identify and focus on specific patterns or qualities of objects in that field of view. There is no thought on the part of the camera (and would likely be no functional doubt if it did have thought) that the objects in it's field of view are false or that the patterns it's designed to seek are not real, not there - though they very often turn out to be. Is it possible that our construction or state leads to similar constraints with regards to what our presumed p-cognition is attending to? These cameras report something in their field of view. A set of data to which they are attending that they assert to be true and accurate. Less and less as we get better at it, but they still report false positives-as-true.

It sounds very familiar to us, the only difference being that we assert that we possess additional qualities or attributes.  A p-quality of perspective.  The ability to observe p-qualities.

Is it possible you and other illusionists are having the illusion of illusionism?

There seems to be no end to the number and type of untrue things that a brain can be convinced of or genuinely report regardless of their state-as-fact or truth evaluability as propositions, sure.  

For illusionists to be having the illusion of illusionism, there would have to be a little man in there, really doing stuff, and really doing the stuff it says.  That's a possibility, but it's not what anything we know about the process or anything we can find in the brain bears out, while what we do know and what we have found already tells a much different story.  

In the most amusing sense, illusionists -are- having the illusion of illusionism - just because they think that the report is false doesn't mean that they aren't connected to it's machinery and constrained by that, just as a camera is constrained in it's perspective, to accept that the product is true.  Recall, AST is not a theory of human mind, it's a theory of how a machine would come to report as much and be convinced by the report which accounts for and predicts that an control schema -like our-... if we had one, would be convinced of the things that we are convinced of, and unaware of the things that we are unaware of.  

It's vaguely aware that the brain is the seat of it's operation because it's attached to a body model - but beyond that it's reports are ambiguous and confused.  We're in here, behind the eyes, up and to the back a bit.  That's useful information if you don't want to get hit in the brain even if it's not useful information in the sense that what it is saying is true or truth evaluable as a proposition (rather than symbolic language or representation).   

It's useful for the report to be more compelling than a fact, as well.  Consider an organism that is capable of attending to pain, but doesn't accept or simply doesn't possess the p content of pain.  Would it react to pain the way that we do, or would it look down at the teeth on it;s arm and go "yeah, that's happening, and?".  What does it say about us that people are also capable of doing this, to a lesser or greater extent?   To drown out pain.  If p-pain is real, and we're products of the machinery which produce it, how is it that we can cause it to appear and disappear regardless of it's instigating conditions' presence?

Is that the very real thing of very real p-pain blipping in and out of existence, or could it be a control schema variously attending and not attending to a set of information about the environments effect on the organism meant to compel and direct action?

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The point is that we are experiential creatures.  The mind is made to experience the combination of processed sensory input and high-level abstraction about the input as "qualia".  We enjoy rich experience, where memories and emotions and connections are entwined.  The experience trains the brain, and allows us to better process future experience.

An illusionist would say that improved processing is the aim - and that the reports don't have to be true as propositions about p-qualities to lead to increased function or more beneficial outcomes. The story doesn't have to be true with respect to it's self to be useful....and, fwiw, that sort of stuff is well below the level of p cognition. The p-thing in the brain doesn't seem to know anything about all of that, completely and thoroughly unaware. None of us are going to be able to draw accurate brain maps by reference to p-content. We can't spit off an io by reference to redness.