Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[polymath257]

Let's look at this because it seems to be the crux of the matter.

What does it mean to 'vividly experience things'? 

Is there a difference with 'dimly experiencing things'? What does the word 'vividly' actually modify?

I guess I only add the word "vividly" to distinguish two different senses of the word "experience" that a person may use. The "dull" sense is when we talk of something that happens to some entity but without being taken in by that entity in a first-person perspective form. The example I mentioned in a prior post was a rock in a river experiencing the splash of water against itself. Now it may be the rock, after all, does have some rudimentary first-person perspective, but intuitively we don't see it as having such. So it only experiences in the "dull" sense.

And the rock does not have complex processing of information from the environment. So it doesn't have the basic requirements of consciousness. But if it *did* it would have a first person perspective, right?

Or, if you want, we can ditch the words "vivid" and "dull" and "dim", and instead contrast "experience" with "no experience" (as long as we understand and agree that we mean experience to be something that is taken in as a first-person form that feels what is happening through the various senses).

Let's take two examples of information that the brain processes. One is the color red when we are looking at it in good light. The other is carbon dioxide level in your blood.

Both of these are processed by the brain, but only one of them is 'conscious': the perception of the color red. The perception of the carbon dioxide levels happens, but is not conscious. The brain reacts to both. For example, it will trigger deeper breathing in response to high CO2 levels.

The question is why? What is the difference in how the brain processes those two pieces of information?

This is a 'soft' problem, but it seems to me to be the key to the question of consciousness. Knowing the differences between how those two pieces of information are processed would point to what, precisely, is happening in 'conscious perception'.

I guess the first question is : do you agree with this assessment? Does it seem to you to be a key question? If not, why not?

If I'm understanding this correctly, I wouldn't cleanly classify this as a 'soft' problem actually. If you're trying to explain the differences by partly explaining how the sensation of "red" is processed, then in my view, that's crossing over into the "hard problem" realm.

Why? What is the difference between 'seeing red' and 'processing the information from the eyes that encodes the color red'?

But if you're not trying to explain how "red" is processed in explaining the differences, then yes, it's a "soft" problem.

So, now, what actually *are* the differences? One big one is that the autonomic nervous system only links to fairly low levels of the brain stem and NOT to the higher regions in the brain (limbic system, cortex).

This suggests to me that the limbic system (which deals with emotions) is the key to what we usually call 'consciousness'. And, in fact, the role of anesthesia is to suppress parts of the activity just above the brain stem to achieve *unconsciousness*.

So why is it 'vivid'? Because the limbic system is strongly connected to the other areas of the brain, making the results of its processing *important* for the processing of other areas.

Now, admittedly there are a LOT of details, but does not this seem like a plausible route towards explaining consciousness? Why we 'feel' strongly: the connections are *important* across the brain. That *is* vividness, only from a different perspective.

The issue I see with this is that it still seems to be providing only a correlation. Contrary to what you're suggesting, it doesn't address why we feel vividly. And just as importantly, it doesn't address how either. I'll grant you that this might be in the right direction, but that's the best this approach you describe would be doing.

What do you expect other than a correlation at this level? A consistent, universal, testable correlation without complicating factors *is* a cause.

Maybe that is the question: what do you mean by the terms 'explanation' and 'cause'? What, precisely, are you looking for?

I'm not sure what that means in context. It seems to me to be simply the concept of identity. So, when a comet hit Jupiter, it did not hit the Earth. From the perspective of the Earth it was third person, from that of Jupiter, it was first person. Now, Jupiter doesn't have a complex enough processing of information for it to be 'conscious', but the comet strike hit there and not here.

Assuming panpsychism is false, then no, I don't agree that planets have perspectives in the same sense we have perspectives. They are two qualitatively different senses. Of course the perspective you speak of is trivial, but first-person perspective (in the typical context of discussions on consciousness) is not trivial in the eyes of many philosophers of the mind.

And they do not do the required complex processing of information. But if they did, they would have a first person point of view.

So, I see first person vs third person to simply be a description of where something happens. Consciousness, on the other hand, seems to be related to complexity of processing of information, probably in real time. The two seem to be very different questions.

If you say so, but first person vs third person is an important consideration when pondering the hard problem.

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

I'll take a look, but I have read Chalmer's book 'The Conscious Mind'.

[emjay]

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

Chalmers' article is really useful.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

Well, if you're interested, this is a thread I started about six years ago when I was quite new to this site, the Seeing Red thread, where several of us discussed these sorts of issues in detail and from a lot of different perspectives. It still remains to me one of the most memorable, inspiring, and, let's say formative, discussions I've ever had on this site... but comes from a time when I had a lot more energy and drive for long discussions than I do now (ie IIRC it lasted about a month of solid posting with massive posts, something I just don't think I could do any more). Looking back at it in hindsight, I'd say it still generally represents my views on the subject, and could probably do much better justice to them than anything I could write in a few posts here in this thread, but at the same time, a lot of time has passed, so there will be differences.

[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.

---

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.

---

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.

[The Grand Nudger]

It seems to me that first person experience is a stand in issue.

Just aim directly and squarely at your dissatisfaction with materialism. It’s likely that you don’t need to refer to consciousness to make that case and that consciousness isn’t even a good example of that case.

[polymath257]

And if the circuitry is detecting and processing the 'feeling of love', then it *is* the feeling of love in the first person.

In the first person ... how does that switch to first person work? And one in which love is felt? How does the "non-feely" electrochemical process translate to the first-person "feely" experience which appears to be as if it did not arise from the firings of neurons? Why does the experience seem qualitatively different from physical stuff including the underlying neurons or their processes?

Who said that the electrochemical processes of the brain are not 'feely'? That they are happening *in that brain* is what it *means* to be 'feely' *for that brain*.

You seem to be taking the switch to first-person for granted, but the hard problem is partly asking about that

---

I was pointing out that it is *logically possible* for air not to be a mixture. You seem to be focused on logical possibility as the standard.

Unless I'm misunderstanding this quote here, I'm not focusing on the logical possibility. It doesn't matter if air is hawayawaya and temperature is tabbalaabilou, and it doesn't matter if we didn't know in the past that air is hawayawaya and temperature is tabbalaabilou. Whatever you're equating air to now, the point is that in this air is just a label you're applying to hawayawaya. It is not something more than that.

No, it is not. Air is that stuff that I breath in every day. It *happens* that it is also a mixture of various gases. But there is no logical necessity that it be that way.

The better analogy is that of temperature. There is no logical requirement that what we measure as temperature is the result of molecular motion. But, in fact, it is the *product* of molecular motion. Talking about temperature and talking about molecular motion are the *same thing* in our universe, just from different perspectives.

Ok, but you also said temperature IS the average kinetic energy of the molecules (per your statement in a prior post). You observe the motion of the molecules, measure the average kinetic energy, and that there is temperature.

But that is *after* we make the connection. Previous to that (and, frankly, after that as well), we measured temperature with a thermometer. That those two measuring processes give the same thing isn't logically necessary. But it is still a fact. And, initially, they *look* like very different things. That they *are* the same comes from a *correspondence* between calculated average kinetic energy and temperature as measured with a thermometer.

The correspondence *is the explanation*.

Analogously, the activity of neurons and consciousness is simply the same thing in this universe, but from different perspectives (that from the outside and that internally).

It's not the same. In the temperature analogy, there is no internal perspective. Otherwise, you're including your/my internal perspective which is what we're trying to explain in the first place.

I guess I see that as irrelevant to whether there is an explanation. The internal perspective arises because things are happening *internal* to one head and not another. I don't see why that alone isn't sufficient to 'explain' the existence of the first person view.

What, precisely, do you mean by 'internal view'? Be specific, but don't use words like 'qualia' or 'consciousness', or anything  that doesn't have a clear description. How is it NOT the same as 'whatever I detect and process'?

---

A lot of the discussion of consciousness reminds me of the God of the gaps. hat, anything that *has* been figured out by science isn't *really God* and anything that hasn't been figured out is 'God acting to do that'. As we get more and more scientific explanations, the 'God gap' gets smaller and smaller.

This seems to be happening with the mind-body problem as well. Initially, the mind was whatever thinks, feels, senses, etc. When it was figured out that the brain does all of those things, the mind became consciousness and qualia, and phenomenology. But whenever we get an explanation of some sensory experience in terms of neural activity, suddenly that isn't what was meant and the gap shifts to something else.

At no point is it possible to nail down the actually nail down the problem. It is all 'mystery' and 'impossible to explain'. Until, of course, it is explained.

Very simple explanations are rejected (since visual and language information is processed in different places, it takes time to move from one to the other and the translation isn't easy). It is said that the explanation doesn't deal with the 'feely' aspect when, in fact, the 'feely' is another sense processed in the brain and we can sometimes, even now, point to where in the brain that is done.

The first person is opposed to the third person and never the two shall meet, but when a direct correspondence between the two is pointed out, that is seen as irrelevant to having an 'explanation'.

That leads me to ask what, precisely, is expected of an explanation. What MORE is desired from the explanation? A cause? OK, then what, precisely, do you mean by 'cause' in this context? Because it seems to me that the correspondence *is* the description of the cause.

[The Grand Nudger]

The machine theory would say that the internal view is not what you detect or process. It’s not seeing, but attending to the fact that you see.

[Disagreeable]

If all Christianity is is an allegory then all Christianity is is a manipulative narrative that evades truth itself.

[polymath257]

If all Christianity is is an allegory then all Christianity is is a manipulative narrative that evades truth itself.

And?

[Belacqua]

If all Christianity is is an allegory then all Christianity is is a manipulative narrative that evades truth itself.

I suppose that depends on the use one makes of allegory.

Do you think that allegory is always an attempt to evade truth?

[Disagreeable]

If all Christianity is is an allegory then all Christianity is is a manipulative narrative that evades truth itself.

And?

No 'And' entailed.

I suppose that depends on the use one makes of allegory.

Does it?

Do you think that allegory is always an attempt to evade truth?

No.