Pleasure and Joy

[genkaus]

Genkaus, a gaggle has the same properties as seven geese. It rains, the river swells, and the levy breaks. Put them together and call it a flood. Nothing new appears when you make a set.

The gaggle is missing the property of seven. Calling it a flood indicates the level of damage. New concepts and information can be derived when things are considered as sets - that's why we make those sets.

You said you thought subjective experiences were causally relevant, but what you really meant was something else.

No, that was what I meant.

You meant that there are no actual subjective experiences, only objective phenomena under another label. In so doing you deny the reality of conscious awareness as commonly understood.

No, I'm saying that there are subjective experiences. That we may, some day, might be able to see them as objective phenomena would not change the fact that they are subjective experiences. However, I did deny the "reality of conscious awareness as commonly understood" because the way it is commonly understood is as existence of a soul.

It's no wonder that bennyboy and you have been talking past each other. He accepts the reality of qualia while you're in zombieland.

I think I have been pretty clear on this - I accept the reality of qualia and I explain it.

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Actual subjective experience is not required to explain behavior. Brain function is sufficient.

Given that that brain function is subjective experience, it becomes included in the explanation automatically.

Here's how your analogy plays out w.r..t black-hole -

Black-hole is not required to explain motion of light. Super-dense matter is sufficient.

I admire your full commitment to your world view. Not many people would claim a Radio Shack chess set has actual imagination.

Most people work with the same erroneous assumptions as you do.

I do not accept the way you define these words. You would presumably say that any device which can react to redness (for example, by stopping at a red light) is experiencing redness. And yet, when I talk about the interchange of photons, some of which represent redness, you do not accept that individual particles are actually experiencing. And when I talk about a galaxy, in which many parts' movement is affected by forces exerted on them by other objects, you do not accept that the galaxy is actually experiencing.

I'm not the one defining these words. And no, I do not say that a device reacting to red light is necessarily sentient. I've been quite clear with regards to my view on the form and function of experience and why it is a reasonable conclusion at one point and not in another.

In case of the galaxy or individual particles, one single causal chain is going on. It receives input, processes it through preset system, gives specific output. Nothing that can be called 'experience' is present here.

In conscious or sentient beings two causal chains occur. The being receives input, processes it and gives output. And this causal chain itself serves as an input for a parallel one. The other system processes the reception and the processing in another manner and gives another set of output. This second causal chain is what we call 'experience'.

If the output given by the entity is not explicable by the existence of the first causal chain, it indicates the existence of a second one. So, if there is a pre-coded program present in the device that dictates reaction to presence of red light, then existence of the second causal chain is not required and inference of experience is invalid. However, if there isn't such a program present, then that indicates a parallel running program which analyzes process itself, i.e. experience.

Water, for example, reacts to a loss of heat by changing its structure to ice. The loss of heat has caused a physical response in the water. Is the water experiencing that heat loss?

No. For the reasons given above.