Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[polymath257]

See this article in which third-person views of consciousness are contrasted with first-person.

Chalmers' article is really useful.

I found it interesting, but also rather frustrating. At no point did he actually *define* what he means by 'first person'. Instead, he always says it is 'mysterious', which isn't very helpful.

I've been through the "hard problem" discussion two or three times on the Internet, back when I was more patient and less grumpy. So every position and every argument that Chalmers cites in the article is something I recognize. It's lovely to see things laid out so plainly, after I struggled to get through it with much less clarity.

I'm also impressed by how well you and @emjay have done on this thread. It reminds me what it's like to be patient and non-grumpy.

It makes sense to keep the zombie problem simple, since it's necessary to address those who deny first-person experience, or its difference from the third person. I'd say what interests me more, however (at the risk of taking things off topic) is the richness of the first person experience, which goes beyond what the zombie issue addresses. 

So for example when we talk about first person experience, we say "the experience of seeing red." But whenever we actually have that experience, we are not simply seeing red. The term "red" covers a wide range of visual experiences. Whenever we have an experience of color in real life it is an experience of that red in that context, under that light. Years ago when I was in art school it was a kind of motto to say "seeing is forgetting the name of the thing you see." So if you say "I see red," it was thought to be too generalizing. The goal was to recreate the particular red you were looking at -- or to create some kind of objective correlative for the experienced object in a different substance -- oil paint or watercolor. 

OK, so you want to find a spectral match to what you saw? If not, I don't understand the problem.

The point is that when a person gets all the way to the point of being aware "I am seeing red," he has always already interpreted the input. It isn't simply a question of a wavelength of light starting a chain of dominoes that give rise to a particular type of qualia. The experience of the color also includes associations and methods of interpretation, like language, memories of other colors, etc. 

Maybe that answers a question I have had: so, qualia encompass the associations and emotions of the scene as well as the sensory aspects?

There's a wonderful book on all this by Umberto Eco. You probably know, when he wasn't writing novels he was a specialist in semiotics, so this is a non-fiction book in which he discusses how the mind interprets, and the degree of influence from not-purely-sensory interpretive influences. 

https://www.amazon.com/Kant-Platypus-Ess...501&sr=1-1

He understands that the hard problem is currently unsolvable, so he metaphorically refers throughout the book to what he calls the "black box," which is his half-serious name for the function that turns brain function into first person experience. 

I guess what really interests me is the possibility of difference -- that people may look at the same world and perceive it very differently, at a very basic level. Someone who has spent decades painting pictures from nature is just going to have different experiences of color from someone who hasn't. The possibility of enriching our interpretations is appealing to me. 

And of course they do. Their brains process the information differently. The expectations, differences, and all other aspects of the processing will be quite different.

There's a wonderful scene in the Tale of Genji where all the courtiers blend up new and original types of incense, and then they have a contest with their most sensitive incense-maker acting as judge. Since smell is the human sense least susceptible to conceptualization, it always impressed me that this group of extreme aesthetes could be so aware. Translations of the book generally have to include long long footnotes explaining the different adjectives used in the original, which just aren't available in English, or even to most modern Japanese people. 

So there are more refined words for different smells? Cool.

Qualia, it seems to me, don't just appear automatically, but are contingent on experience and thus can be trained, enriched, etc. Connoisseurship or the aestheticism of someone like Dorian Gray or des Esseintes (though they are not admirable in other ways) always seemed enviable to me. 

OK, sorry for the tangent. Again, I admire your input on this thread.

I've never quite grasped what a quale is, but yes, different brains process things differently based upon a whole host of things, from genetics, to previous experience, to expectations at the time.

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Chalmers' article is really useful.

Yeah, it's a fascinating read.

This bit, I think, we can all relate here:


This direct correspondence (some might even say isomorphism) between first-person phenomena and (a certain subset of) third-person phenomena seems to be what often leads to confusion when discussing first-person issues. Many commentators, particularly those in the third-person camp, give the illusion of reducing first-person mysteries by appropriating the usual first-person words to refer to the third-person phenomena to which they correspond. It would be a final irony if this was to happen to the word "first-person" itself. I hereby issue a plea that this word be off-limits to the third-personites. If they wish, they may argue that the first-person does not exist; but they may not pretend to 'explain' the first-person by describing only third-person phenomena.

And I would argue that the existence of the isomorphism *is* the explanation.

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Here is the part from the Chalmer's article I found most interesting/frustrating:

(1) The problem of QUALIA.

Qualia are the qualitative aspects of subjective experience, particularly sensations such as colour, taste and pain. One can ask: how could a third-person theory begin to explain the sensation of seeing the colour red? Could a theory be given which enabled a being, as intelligent as ourselves but without the capacity for sight (or even a visual cortex), to truly understand the subjective experience of the colour red? Analogously, as Nagel asks, could we ever understand how it feels to BE a bat, or another creature with very different mental architecture.

It is extremely difficult to imagine how a physical explanation of brain architecture could solve these problems. If, in answer to the question "could a sightless being understand the sensation of red?", the reductionist answers "yes," then we have the right to ask "How, possibly?". I believe that no satisfactory answer to this has been given. If, on the other hand the reductionist answers "no," then the very least of her problems is a serious epistemological limitation.

Well, the physical explanation can show which things the bat perceives as different, how it reacts to those perceptions, what emotions correspond, etc. Pretty much any specific question you ask can be answered. How is that NOT an explanation of the experience?

maybe the question is better addressed by the way that ducks see things. Instead of the 3 color receptors humans have, ducks have 7 different color receptors. So they are able to distinguish colors humans cannot distinguish.

So the question is what do they see 'from a first person perspective'. When they look at two colors that they can distinguish that we cannot, how does their perception differ from ours? if we see a uniform 'red', they will see two different colors (as an example). And since, their brains process visual information in a very different way than humans, there isn't even a good correspondence between their experiences and ours.

In some ways I find it easier to imagine echolocation, which is just an extension of hearing to another range of frequencies. But to actually see different colors when we see the same, *that* can boggle a mind.

But, they would see 'red1' as opposed to 'red2' and see them 'vividly' (assuming the area is well lit). They would have a first person perspective that is determined by how their eyes and brain process the light that they are exposed to. And that first person perspective would have different colors for red1 and red2.