I can build an agent that tracks how many sheep are in the pasture using an internal mental bucket, and keeps looking for sheep until they’re all returned. From an outside standpoint, this agent’s mental bucket is meaningful because there’s a causal process that correlates it to the sheep, and this correlation is made use of to steer the world into futures where all sheep are retrieved. And then the mysterious sensation of about-ness is just what it feels like from the inside to be that agent, with a side order of explicitly modeling both yourself and the world so that you can imagine that your map corresponds to the territory, with a side-side order of your brain making the simplifying assumption that (your map of) the map has a primitive intrinsic correspondence to (your map of) the territory.
In actuality this correspondence is not the primitive and local quality it feels like; it’s maintained by the meeting of hypotheses and reality in sense data. A third party or reflecting agent would be able to see the globally maintained correspondence by simultaneously tracing back actual causes of sense data and hypothesized causes of sense data, but this is a chain property involving real lattices of causal links and hypothetical lattices of causal links meeting in sense data, not an intrinsic quality of a single node in the lattice considered in isolation from the senses and the hypotheses linking it to the senses.
So far as I can tell, there’s nothing left to explain.
--
“At exactly which point in the process does the pebble become magic?” says Mark.
“It… um…” Now I’m starting to get confused. I shake my head to clear away cobwebs. This all seemed simple enough when I woke up this morning, and the pebble-and-bucket system hasn’t gotten any more complicated since then. “This is a lot easier to understand if you remember that the point of the system is to keep track of sheep.”
I agree with all of this… I would personally ask one question though, as I’m quite confused here… I think (pardon me if I’m putting words in anyone’s mouth) that the epiphenomenalist should agree that it’s all related causally, and when the decision comes to say that “I’ve noticed that I’ve noticed that I’m aware of a chair”, or something, it comes from causal relations. But that’s not located the… “Subjective” or “first person” “experience” (whatever any of those word ‘mean’).
I observe (through photons and my eyes and all the rest) the five sheep going through the gate, even though I miss a sixth, and I believe that the world is how I think it is, and I believe my vision is an intrinsic property of me in the world, mistakenly of course. Actually, when I say I’ve seen five sheep go through the gate, loads of processes that are below the level the conscious/speaking me is aware of, are working away, and are just making the top level stuff available—the stuff that evolution has decided would be beneficial for me to be able to talk about.
That doesn’t mean I’m not conscious of the sheep, just that I’m mistaken about what my consciousness is, and what exactly it’s telling me.
Where does the ‘aware’ bit come in? The ‘feeling’? The ‘subjective’?
(My apologies if I’ve confused a well argued discussion)
And this responds to what I said… how?
I can build an agent that tracks how many sheep are in the pasture using an internal mental bucket, and keeps looking for sheep until they’re all returned. From an outside standpoint, this agent’s mental bucket is meaningful because there’s a causal process that correlates it to the sheep, and this correlation is made use of to steer the world into futures where all sheep are retrieved. And then the mysterious sensation of about-ness is just what it feels like from the inside to be that agent, with a side order of explicitly modeling both yourself and the world so that you can imagine that your map corresponds to the territory, with a side-side order of your brain making the simplifying assumption that (your map of) the map has a primitive intrinsic correspondence to (your map of) the territory.
In actuality this correspondence is not the primitive and local quality it feels like; it’s maintained by the meeting of hypotheses and reality in sense data. A third party or reflecting agent would be able to see the globally maintained correspondence by simultaneously tracing back actual causes of sense data and hypothesized causes of sense data, but this is a chain property involving real lattices of causal links and hypothetical lattices of causal links meeting in sense data, not an intrinsic quality of a single node in the lattice considered in isolation from the senses and the hypotheses linking it to the senses.
So far as I can tell, there’s nothing left to explain.
--
“At exactly which point in the process does the pebble become magic?” says Mark.
“It… um…” Now I’m starting to get confused. I shake my head to clear away cobwebs. This all seemed simple enough when I woke up this morning, and the pebble-and-bucket system hasn’t gotten any more complicated since then. “This is a lot easier to understand if you remember that the point of the system is to keep track of sheep.”
I agree with all of this… I would personally ask one question though, as I’m quite confused here… I think (pardon me if I’m putting words in anyone’s mouth) that the epiphenomenalist should agree that it’s all related causally, and when the decision comes to say that “I’ve noticed that I’ve noticed that I’m aware of a chair”, or something, it comes from causal relations. But that’s not located the… “Subjective” or “first person” “experience” (whatever any of those word ‘mean’).
I observe (through photons and my eyes and all the rest) the five sheep going through the gate, even though I miss a sixth, and I believe that the world is how I think it is, and I believe my vision is an intrinsic property of me in the world, mistakenly of course. Actually, when I say I’ve seen five sheep go through the gate, loads of processes that are below the level the conscious/speaking me is aware of, are working away, and are just making the top level stuff available—the stuff that evolution has decided would be beneficial for me to be able to talk about. That doesn’t mean I’m not conscious of the sheep, just that I’m mistaken about what my consciousness is, and what exactly it’s telling me. Where does the ‘aware’ bit come in? The ‘feeling’? The ‘subjective’?
(My apologies if I’ve confused a well argued discussion)