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RE: Qualia - Everyone Sees The World Differently

in #philosophy5 years ago

We experience the world and that is more than just processes in the brain, it is contents of consciousness.

There is a direct correlation between brain processes and our first hand experience of the world. If your brain no process, you no experience. If your brain processes differently than it did a minute ago (say, with the help of some psychoactive substances or a really solid kick to the head), then your experience also changes.

Hell, you can verify this yourself without any drugs, swift kick, or special equipment. Just hold your breath until your brain is starved of oxygen enough that it can't process normally and stars will begin to appear.

There's no doubt that neural activity IS what we experience, that brain processes and our experience ARE one in the same.

However, the subjective experience content of a mental state can neither be captured through measurements nor expressed through words.

Scientists are now imaging what someone is experiencing from brain waves. I totally sh*t you not. So... yeah, it can be captured and shown using EEG.

*"When we see something, our brain creates a mental percept, which is essentially a mental impression of that thing. We were able to capture this percept using EEG to get a direct illustration of what's happening in the brain during this process," says Nemrodov. *

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180222145037.htm

Everything feels different for everyone in a certain way when we experience something.

Colors feel like I'm really, really, really HIGH.

... we could never be sure that your red is also my red.

I understand now! That whole bit that doctors do to diagnose colorblindness is just new age hoooey! How could I have not seen it before! (massive sarcasm)

Colors are created in the brain by different wavelengths of light.

Yes, that's right, light shines directly into our brain. I need to rip out that whole bit about sense perception from my psychology 101 book. It's garbage, apparently.

But how should i know that your experience of red is the same as my experience of red? The answer is: not at all. That is impossible to know

Repeating this doesn't it make it any more true or profound. I've already pointed out two ways.

The psyche of others is unattainable for us.

Not entirely, as I've pointed out. Here's another reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_identification

Or maybe you're trying to point out that the human species aren't capable of telepathic mind reading. Oh, wait.... scientists are even doing that now.

https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-to-brain-mind-connection-lets-three-people-share-thoughts

The chaos of black spots suddenly becomes a meaningful structure. Only by the memory of the other picture.

You could perhaps have asked "do you see a mustachoid man in this seemingly random bit of dots?" At any rate, this is a classic example of perception, not consciousness. It's the sort of thing you see in psychology 101.

And surely you also know the pictures in which two or more different things can be recognized. These pictures show you how subjective the things are.

This isn't at all what those pictures demonstrate. They demonstrate two competing interpretations of the same image. Again, this is from the perception chapter of any psychology 101 book. If you mean, "this shows that your perceptions are the result of a perceptual process and thus bullshit to begin with", then I agree with you. Alas your first sentence :

We experience the world and that is more than just processes in the brain, it is contents of consciousness.

But I digress...

Our brain creates our reality and only to this reality we have access.

A++

We experience things outside of us, although they arise in us in our brains,

Dammit! You had it right! Now you introduce a hell of a contradiction.

I'll go ahead and give the spoiler. We don't experience anything "outside of us." It all happens in the brain. We experience something waaay down the pipeline from sensory nerves, but what comes through those pipelines are unprocessed (or at least, in the case of the optical nerve, underprocessed) neural impulses.

It is not easy to become aware of this.

It's not easy to become aware that you're reading neural impulses now, and not words.

The question that arises naturally is, how does this experience arise?

That would be the hard problem. Well, not really, you forgot something. I'll add it...

The question that arises naturally is, how does this experience arise from neural activity?

I will now answer your concluding questions:

Is it due to the complex arrangement of matter, i.e. a materialistic explanation?

Yes.

Or is consciousness perhaps the basis for everything at all?

Yes.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

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@hardnell

wow... first of all, thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed comment and also for trying to answer some of my questions according to your point of view.

Well, your answers have made me wonder how you feel about the whole thing and I respect that you view a person's consciousness as a sequence and product of experience, of the brain. I know many who think that way. But personally I see it differently.

And yes, I know the attempts to measure human brainwaves and to reproduce them both visually and audioally. But what the program shows at the end is how the programmer sees things. My brainwaves will show the red what the programmer has programmed into the program as red. And so it is with many other things.

Which red is the truth now? Yours or mine? Does there even exist a red with a truth? It's the same with views and opinions. Which one of us is right? You with your opinion or I with mine? You see a 9 and think it's right and maybe the truth for you and I see a 6 and I think it's right for me and maybe its my truth.
You try to convince me of your opinion (your view = your truth = your reality) and I try to convince you of mine. (my view = my reality = my truth)

But I think that there is no ultimate truth. There are only views and everything is built on them ;)

In ref to both @oendertuerk and @hartnell, before venturing towards an ultimate truth, it needs to be precisely worded - reminds me of the computer in Hitchhiker's Guide. So, if all we experience is our mind, is there any state of mind that is universal, something we can all agree upon? This is not dissimilar to Descartes' meditation, although the answer is different.

There is a state of pure awareness (or consciousness) devoid of any other experience. It is the ground state of consciousness. We don't usually notice it as our attention tends to focus on the phenomena generated by the mind, be they deemed external or internal (the mind doesn't seem to care). It has various names, depending on the language of the texts, but the definitions show such words to be synonyms, and hence the experiences to be the same.

How can one experience a kind of stateless state? What is interesting is that the state has no phenomena that one can point to, and yet the memory of the state remains - it is not a memory-less sleep, it is a conscious state. Indeed, if I was more skillful, and diligent, I should be able to extend such periods of consciousness - so-called sleep yoga claims to have techniques to achieve this.

When one comes out of the pure state, there is an admixture of our standard conscious mental activity with the ground state still present. Mental activities appear with a certain detachment. Without practice, the ground state fades back into the background, yet can be accessed - and it will always be the same state.

And yet all are in a different state, in which each one moves his reality.
is the highest state the truth? who determines the truth?

To give an analogy, a computer can run many programs, yet its kernel, the heart of the OS, is the same. It can even be thought of as the interface between machine and experience, between biology and experience, for us.

Truth? That depends on the question. The answers to many questions do not come in words but in experiences. Hence the fascination with things such as Zen koans, which make no sense unless you are inside having the experience.

I wanted to make it clear why I upvoted and make a comment on what appears to be a habit of yours that runs counter to it.

Truth? That depends on the question.

Brilliant! That's probably the most succinct, accurate and rational thing that any one of us have said on this post.

The answers to many questions do not come in words but in experiences. Hence the fascination with things such as Zen koans, which make no sense unless you are inside having the experience.

Why try to sound smart when what you've just said is actually really smart?

Boggles the mind.

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