“some part of my mind signaled recognition (erroneously or not) of a signal in my mind as representing blue...
Surely the cognitive processes which go into implementing your experience are not always elsewhere, that it would require receiving a signal from somewhere else in order to know what is going on with itself. There is no need for a signal from some other process to take time to travel to the processes implementing your experience if the process simply constitutes your conscious experience.
There is no Cartesian theater, with you in the seat of the mind, receiving sensory/mental inputs from everywhere else in your brain.
“some part of my mind signaled recognition (erroneously or not) of a signal in my mind as representing blue...
Surely the cognitive processes which go into implementing your experience are not always elsewhere, that it would require receiving a signal from somewhere else in order to know what is going on with itself.
Note that the passage you quoted doesn’t specify whether those parts are different parts, and that the signal from the optical nerve has to be identified as corresponding to the signal representing the concept “blue” at some stage should be fairly uncontroversial. This was fully intentional since I wanted to make the statement to rely on as few assumptions as possible (e. g. avoided using the words brain, nerve, neuron, visual cortex etc).
Nevertheless I would also mostly agree with the position you read me as expressing.
Unless you think a single neuron can have full self awareness other neurons have to be involved to represent knowledge about the state of a particular neuron. Knowledge about a signal and the signal itself have to use separate (though potentially overlapping) brainware up until the smallest entity that has knowledge about itself. I see no reason to assume that there is a hierarchy with multiple levels of such entities. It seems entirely plausible that the lowest level at which explicit knowledge about mental states exists is at a level where (a subset of) such knowledge is available to the conscious mind.
There is no need for a signal from some other process to take time to travel to the processes implementing your experience if the process simply constitutes your conscious experience.
Of course not, that’s just nonsense. But knowledge about experience and the experience itself are different things unless the experience is somehow self-referential, and I’m not convinced this is ever the case. Experience-> knowledge of experience → knowldge of the knowldege → detection of potential infinite loop
seems at least as plausible as experience-> knowledge of experience → localized self-referential knowledge.
Also the process that leads from a signal arriving in your visual cortex to forming a thought like “I am seeing blue right now” would be complicated and involve many different parts of the brain (representing the exact shade of the color, recognizing it as belonging to blue and associating it with the concept of blue, activating all the various immediate associations including the word “blue”, recognizing that this has happened, forming the sentence...) even if localized self-referential knowledge is the end result. All of the various stages seem to be part of what would be called experiencing seeing blue.
There is no Cartesian theater, with you in the seat of the mind, receiving sensory/mental inputs from everywhere else in your brain.
No, of course not. That would be the exact opposite of what I claimed! My point is exactly that such things are spread out over different parts of the brain. I think different parts of the mind form an “audience” for each other, though (with considerable overlap between the audience and the performers (perhaps the audience even being a strict subset) and each audience member only receiving a subset of the performance).
Edit: On review it seems the word experience is distinctly unhelpful, maybe it would be better to taboo it.
Surely the cognitive processes which go into implementing your experience are not always elsewhere, that it would require receiving a signal from somewhere else in order to know what is going on with itself. There is no need for a signal from some other process to take time to travel to the processes implementing your experience if the process simply constitutes your conscious experience.
There is no Cartesian theater, with you in the seat of the mind, receiving sensory/mental inputs from everywhere else in your brain.
Note that the passage you quoted doesn’t specify whether those parts are different parts, and that the signal from the optical nerve has to be identified as corresponding to the signal representing the concept “blue” at some stage should be fairly uncontroversial. This was fully intentional since I wanted to make the statement to rely on as few assumptions as possible (e. g. avoided using the words brain, nerve, neuron, visual cortex etc).
Nevertheless I would also mostly agree with the position you read me as expressing.
Unless you think a single neuron can have full self awareness other neurons have to be involved to represent knowledge about the state of a particular neuron. Knowledge about a signal and the signal itself have to use separate (though potentially overlapping) brainware up until the smallest entity that has knowledge about itself. I see no reason to assume that there is a hierarchy with multiple levels of such entities. It seems entirely plausible that the lowest level at which explicit knowledge about mental states exists is at a level where (a subset of) such knowledge is available to the conscious mind.
Of course not, that’s just nonsense. But knowledge about experience and the experience itself are different things unless the experience is somehow self-referential, and I’m not convinced this is ever the case. Experience-> knowledge of experience → knowldge of the knowldege → detection of potential infinite loop seems at least as plausible as experience-> knowledge of experience → localized self-referential knowledge.
Also the process that leads from a signal arriving in your visual cortex to forming a thought like “I am seeing blue right now” would be complicated and involve many different parts of the brain (representing the exact shade of the color, recognizing it as belonging to blue and associating it with the concept of blue, activating all the various immediate associations including the word “blue”, recognizing that this has happened, forming the sentence...) even if localized self-referential knowledge is the end result. All of the various stages seem to be part of what would be called experiencing seeing blue.
No, of course not. That would be the exact opposite of what I claimed! My point is exactly that such things are spread out over different parts of the brain. I think different parts of the mind form an “audience” for each other, though (with considerable overlap between the audience and the performers (perhaps the audience even being a strict subset) and each audience member only receiving a subset of the performance).
Edit: On review it seems the word experience is distinctly unhelpful, maybe it would be better to taboo it.