Tags / 20 quotes from 5 sources
#subjective-experience
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Irreducible subjectivity
As far as we can tell, certain patterns of activity in this distributed network give rise to conscious experience. But fundamentally, this network’s activity is self-contained and the feeling of a unified flow of consciousness you have is not just from the processing of sensory…
The hard problem of consciousness
Many researchers in AI and neuroscience choose not to grapple with what philosopher David Chalmers calls the “hard problem” of consciousness. The hard problem refers to subjective or phenomenal experience. Chalmers argues that solving perception or cognition is easy because we…
Why the apple stays red
However, an apple still looks red at the beach on a sunny day, and at your desk in your office on a rainy day. There is about a hundred times more light hitting your eye at the beach than in your office—yet the apple is still red. The redness of the apple is entirely…
Back pain is ontologically subjective
Kant argued that all the things we think of as being objects in the world are only objects in our heads. And, as Searle would say in more modern philosophical language, these things have an ontologically subjective mode of existence. Another example could be your back pain. It…
Must machines acquire subjectivity?
believe that the objective mind-independent world does exist. First-person conscious experience is intrinsically subjective, relative and uncertain. How can the field of artificial intelligence use the objective, third-person, logical methods of computer science to create a…
The mysterious flame of consciousness
The fundamental problem arises because all our current physics, including the Theory of Everything, has no prediction for, or understanding of, how subjective states can be objective states—or even how subjective states could be based in an objective state. Here we can see the…
Can LSD glimpse the view from nowhere?
There is no doubt that we each have private, uniquely subjective experiences that exist only in our heads. Furthermore, we can only perceive the world from our first-person perspectives, as separate from the world. This may follow from the fact that consciousness and its…
Edge.org
Consciousness and subjective experience
Our usual rule of thumb for the presence of consciousness is to assess, based on superficial cues, how similar to ourselves something appears to be. Thus a dog is more conscious than a duck, which in turn is more conscious than a daffodil. But our intuitions about so many…
Functional And Physical Objects - The Big Picture
Karl popper's three worlds of knowledge
World 1: There is, first, the world that consists of physical bodies: of stones and of stars; of plants and of animals; but also of radiation, and of other forms of physical energy. I (Karl Popper) will call this physical world ‘world 1’. World 2: There is, secondly, the mental…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Experiences versus objects without qualitative feel
So far you have had three types of conscious experiences: thinking about something, intentionally doing something, and feeling a sensation. What is the problem? Well, now look at the objects around you, the chairs and tables, houses and trees. These objects are not in any sense…
Three grades of solipsism
The view that I am the only person who has mental states is called “solipsism.” Solipsism comes in at least three different grades. One, the most extreme form: I am the only person in the world who has mental states; and indeed in some forms, nothing exists in the world except…
Qualia: the qualitative feel of experience
Conscious experiences have a qualitative aspect. There is a qualitative feel to drinking beer, which is quite different from the qualitative feel of listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Several philosophers have found it useful to introduce a technical term to describe this…
What is it like to be a bat
One of the earliest well-known arguments against functionalist types of materialism was advanced in an article by Thomas Nagel called, “What It Is Like to Be a Bat?”1 According to Nagel, the really difficult part of the mind-body problem is the problem of consciousness. Suppose…
Mary has never seen red
A similar argument was advanced by the Australian philosopher, Frank Jackson.2 Jackson imagines a neuro-biologist, Mary, who knows all there is to know about color perception. She has a total and complete knowledge of the neurophysiology of our color-perceiving apparatus, and…
The illusion of dualism
Once again it seems to me the illusion of dualism is generated by misunderstanding a very real distinction. There really is a distinction between those irreducible features of the world that have a first-person or subjective ontology and those that do not. But it is a deep…
Epistemic versus ontological subjectivity
The fact that conscious states are ontologically subjective, in the sense that they exist only as experienced by a human or animal subject, does not imply that there cannot be a scientifically objective study of conscious states. “Objective” and “subjective” are systematically…
Neurology must study subjective feelings
the whole science of neurology requires that we try to seek an epistemically objective scientific account of pains, anxieties, and other afflictions that patients suffer from in order that we can treat these with medical techniques. Whenever I hear philosophers and…
Consciousness is qualitative, subjective and unified
I used to think that these three features, qualitativeness, subjectivity, and unity, could be described as distinct features of consciousness. It now seems to me that that is a mistake; they are all aspects of the same phenomenon. Consciousness is by its very essence…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
The systematic elusiveness of I
We do not observe the self in the same way that we observe the yellowness of a tulip, the smell of coffee or the thought that I really must book my train. The self is what is having those thoughts and perceptions – it is not itself a perception. And when you introspect, you…
Neural correlates are not experiences
The second truth is that whatever thoughts and feelings are, they are not straightforwardly physical. You can’t see a memory under a microscope, and an emotion has no mass or velocity. It is true that with fMRI scanners you can see the brain activity associated with such…