I take your point, I really do. I will for example avoid ‘qualia’ as a word and use other terms.
But here is my problem. I have been following what the scientists that research it have been saying about consciousness for some years. They call it consciousness. They call it that because the people they know and I know and you know call it that. Now you are suggesting nicely that I call it something else and there is no other simple word or phrase that describes consciousness.
When I wrote a post I defined as well as I could how I was using the word. I could invent a word like ‘xness’ but I would have to keep saying that ‘xness’ is like consciousness in everything but name. And it would not accomplish much because it is not the word or even particular philosophies that is the source of the problem. It is the how and where and why and when that the brain produces consciousness. If we disagreed about what an electron was, it would not help to change the name. In the same way, if we disagree about what consciousness is, this is not a semantic problem. We know what we are talking about as well as we would if we could point at it, we have a different views about its nature.
To categorize is to throw away information. If you’re told that a falling tree makes a “sound”, you don’t know what the actual sound is; you haven’t actually heard the tree falling. If a coin lands “heads”, you don’t know its radial orientation. A blue egg-shaped thing may be a “blegg”, but what if the exact egg shape varies, or the exact shade of blue? You want to use categories to throw away irrelevant information, to sift gold from dust, but often the standard categorization ends up throwing out relevant information too. And when you end up in that sort of mental trouble, the first and most obvious solution is to play Taboo.
For example: “Play Taboo” is itself a leaky generalization. Hasbro’s version is not the rationalist version; they only list five additional banned words on the card, and that’s not nearly enough coverage to exclude thinking in familiar old words. What rationalists do would count as playing Taboo—it would match against the “play Taboo” concept—but not everything that counts as playing Taboo works to force original seeing. If you just think “play Taboo to force original seeing”, you’ll start thinking that anything that counts as playing Taboo must count as original seeing.
The rationalist version isn’t a game, which means that you can’t win by trying to be clever and stretching the rules. You have to play Taboo with a voluntary handicap: Stop yourself from using synonyms that aren’t on the card. You also have to stop yourself from inventing a new simple word or phrase that functions as an equivalent mental handle to the old one. You are trying to zoom in on your map, not rename the cities; dereference the pointer, not allocate a new pointer; see the events as they happen, not rewrite the cliche in a different wording.[emphasis added]
By visualizing the problem in more detail, you can see the lost purpose: Exactly what do you do when you “play Taboo”? What purpose does each and every part serve?
The specific advantage I see of cracking open the black-box of “consciousness” in this conversation is that I expect it to be the fastest way to one of the following useful outcomes:
“On page 8675309 of I Wrote “Consciousness Explained” Twenty Years Ago Haven’t You Gotten It By Now by Daniel Dennett, he says that fribblety chacocoa opoloba doesn’t exist—here’s the quote.” “Oh, I see the confusion! No, he’s talking about albittiver rikvotil, as you can see from this context, that quote, and this journal paper.”
“On page 8675309 of I Wrote “Consciousness Explained” Twenty Years Ago Haven’t You Gotten It By Now by Daniel Dennett, he says that fribblety chacocoa opoloba doesn’t exist—here’s the quote.” “But that doesn’t exist, according to the four experiments described in these three research papers, and doesn’t have to exist by this philosophical argument.”
Ok, its my bed time here in France. I will sleep on this and maybe I can be more positive in the morning. But the likelihood is that I will go back to the occassional lurck.
Your comment does not make a great deal of sense to me, no one appears to be interested in what I am interested in (contrary to what I thought previously), the horrid disagreement about Alicorn’s posting is disturbing, and so was the discussion of asking for a drink. I was not upset at the time with the remarks about my spelling and I would correct them. But now I think, is there any latitude for a dyslexic? I thought the site was for discussion ideas not everything but.
I apologize for making a big deal of this, but my main point is that I want to know I’m talking about the thing you’re interested in, not about something else. I wasn’t even really trying to address what you said—just to make some suggestions to reduce the confusion floating around.
Have a good night—hope I can catch you on the flip side.
Apology accepted. You are not the problem—I would not go away because of one conversation.
I have decided that I will take a less active part in LW for a while. It is very time consuming and I have a lot of actually productive reading and blogging to do. By productive I mean things that add to my understanding. I will look to see what has been posted and will probably read the odd one. I may even write a small comment from time to time. The posting that I was preparing for LW will be abandoned. I would put in too much effort for too little serious productive useful discussion. Better to put the effort elsewhere.
I take your point, I really do. I will for example avoid ‘qualia’ as a word and use other terms.
But here is my problem. I have been following what the scientists that research it have been saying about consciousness for some years. They call it consciousness. They call it that because the people they know and I know and you know call it that. Now you are suggesting nicely that I call it something else and there is no other simple word or phrase that describes consciousness.
When I wrote a post I defined as well as I could how I was using the word. I could invent a word like ‘xness’ but I would have to keep saying that ‘xness’ is like consciousness in everything but name. And it would not accomplish much because it is not the word or even particular philosophies that is the source of the problem. It is the how and where and why and when that the brain produces consciousness. If we disagreed about what an electron was, it would not help to change the name. In the same way, if we disagree about what consciousness is, this is not a semantic problem. We know what we are talking about as well as we would if we could point at it, we have a different views about its nature.
That’s not quite what I meant either (although I actually approve of avoiding the term “qualia”, full stop):
The specific advantage I see of cracking open the black-box of “consciousness” in this conversation is that I expect it to be the fastest way to one of the following useful outcomes:
“But you haven’t talked about fribblety chacocoa opoloba.” “I haven’t talked about what? I don’t think I’ve ever actually observed that.”
“On page 8675309 of I Wrote “Consciousness Explained” Twenty Years Ago Haven’t You Gotten It By Now by Daniel Dennett, he says that fribblety chacocoa opoloba doesn’t exist—here’s the quote.” “Oh, I see the confusion! No, he’s talking about albittiver rikvotil, as you can see from this context, that quote, and this journal paper.”
“On page 8675309 of I Wrote “Consciousness Explained” Twenty Years Ago Haven’t You Gotten It By Now by Daniel Dennett, he says that fribblety chacocoa opoloba doesn’t exist—here’s the quote.” “But that doesn’t exist, according to the four experiments described in these three research papers, and doesn’t have to exist by this philosophical argument.”
Edit: Also, there’s no requirement that you actually solve the problem of what it is—a sufficiently specific and detailed map leading to the thing to be observed suffices.
Ok, its my bed time here in France. I will sleep on this and maybe I can be more positive in the morning. But the likelihood is that I will go back to the occassional lurck.
Your comment does not make a great deal of sense to me, no one appears to be interested in what I am interested in (contrary to what I thought previously), the horrid disagreement about Alicorn’s posting is disturbing, and so was the discussion of asking for a drink. I was not upset at the time with the remarks about my spelling and I would correct them. But now I think, is there any latitude for a dyslexic? I thought the site was for discussion ideas not everything but.
Good night.
Good night.
I apologize for making a big deal of this, but my main point is that I want to know I’m talking about the thing you’re interested in, not about something else. I wasn’t even really trying to address what you said—just to make some suggestions to reduce the confusion floating around.
Have a good night—hope I can catch you on the flip side.
Apology accepted. You are not the problem—I would not go away because of one conversation.
I have decided that I will take a less active part in LW for a while. It is very time consuming and I have a lot of actually productive reading and blogging to do. By productive I mean things that add to my understanding. I will look to see what has been posted and will probably read the odd one. I may even write a small comment from time to time. The posting that I was preparing for LW will be abandoned. I would put in too much effort for too little serious productive useful discussion. Better to put the effort elsewhere.