Re: Qualia Question

Curt Welch wrote:

> That's because you are making false assumptions about what consciousness
> is. You, and many people, have been conditioned to believe that conscious
> sensation is something only a limited set of objects on this earth have the
> power to experience (many seem to think it's limited to humans). How can
> anyone know that rocks don't have some level of conscious senstations? How
> did it become a "fact" that rocks don't have conscious senstaions? Where
> is the data to support this fact?


It comes from what we know about *how* we are conscious. It requires a
functioning brain. If you are asleep, anaesthetised or dead, you are
not conscious. (Alternatively, if everything is cosncious, as you say,
then unconcious people are consious!).

> > > Hook the signal to an input, and
> > > we become conscious of it.
> >
> > It would be nice if it were that easy, no?
>
> It is that easy. The only reason people think it's not that easy is
> because they have been brainwashed by conditioning to think it's hard.
> They have been brainwashed to believe rocks don't have conscious sensations
> even though there is zero evidence to support that "fact".
>
> All we know about rocks is that they don't act like humans. They act like
> rocks. We know nothing about their subjective conscious experiences. And
> since they don't speak our language, they can't talk to us about it. But
> that doesn't mean they don't have some type of conscious experience. Same
> thing for all objects on earth.
>
> I'm not trying to imply that rocks spend all day thinking about the meaning
> of life. I'm just saying that the evidence we have available to us
> suggests that conscious sensation is not an absolute which some things like
> humans have, and others do not have.

If it exists in degree, that still does not mean everything has it.
Existing in degrees can include degrees of zero.

> All objects must be conscious to a
> different degree.

Doesn't follow from anything you have said. It is just about barely
possible, perhaps, but there is not 'must' to it.

> This is the easy answer. Why chose the "hard" answer
> which explains nothing when we have an easy answer that fits all the data?

'God created everything miracuously' is easier than evolution.

> > > We react to pain in the ways we do because of the fact we are a
> > > learning machine motivated by pain. The way it "feels" to us is a
> > > result of how we learn to react to it.
> >
> > I'd agree. But I don't think you've got anywhere near explaining why we
> > feel this as 'pain' rather than the learning system simply taking its
> > cues form the physiological data available to it. Why does pain hurt?
>
> Only because you say it "hurts". You have been conditioned to say "pain
> hurts" and "grass is green".

So nothing hurts an infant or animal ?

> People can be conditioned to like pain with the help of a strong positive
> reinforcer like sex. It doesn't "hurt" them like it hurts most of us.
> What does that mean?

It means human psychology is complex and some feeling can be
accompanied
by complex higer-level feelings. It's not that pain doesn't hurt
masochists at all -- they wouldn't like it that way!


> When we sense pain (like pinching ourselves), we can sense that it is
> happening. We can sense that it's a different sensation from vision, or
> hearing, or normal touch, or taste. The fact that you call this sensation
> "hurting" is just something you have been conditioned to say.

Yes, but the relevant fact is that it is a sensation. "You have been
conditioned to refer to large pachyderms as 'elephants'" does not
answer
the question: "why is there an elephant in the room?"

> But what else happens when we receive pain vs. say, sound? Try it and see
> for yourself. I for example notice things happening to my entire body. I
> notice that my leg might start to shake - that muscles tend to tense up. I
> notice my attention gets focused on the pain and it's hard to think about
> other subjects as long as the pain sensation persists. The body responds
> to pain in ways which are uniquely different than how we respond to a song
> playing on a radio. Some of that response is no doubt hard-wired
> physiological effects which help us survive. But at our conscious level,
> not only are we sensing the pain directly, but we are also sensing how our
> body is reacting to it. Our conscious experience of pain is not just the
> pain itself, but it's how we sense ourselves reacting to it. We recognize
> it as "pain" as much by what it makes us do, as what it is itself. We
> recognize it as being special by how it makes us react more so than how it
> directly "feels".
>
> Pain also creates a very "loud"/strong signal for even a minor pain so it's
> hard to ignore simply because it's so strong.
>
> On top of this, our learning hardware is conditioned to make us avoid pain
> - so when we receive pain, the body is trying to stop it - so how we tend
> to respond to pain is very different from how we will respond to sensations
> that are not painful. When I feel pain, I'm conditioned to react to it
> very quickly to stop it. If I feel something like a pinch or bee-sting I
> immediately stop everything I'm doing and turn all my attention to
> discovering the source of the pain and finding a way to stop it. We sense
> ourselves reacting like this after the fact, and all this becomes what
> "pain feels like" to us. When I pinch myself, I have to fight the urge to
> stop pinching myself. My instinct is to stop causing myself pain, and I
> have to mentally focus in order to keep hurting myself. This is all
> because we have been conditioned to avoid pain.
>
> These I think are the type of things we end up sensing and identifying with
> the "special nature" of "feeling pain". i.e, nothing more than a lot of
> physiological reactions throughout our body.

So what physiological reactions consititute the difference between
red and blue, or c sharp and f ?

> > Why is pain not sufficiently described by the neronal activity that
> > goes with it?
>
> I think it is. Why do you think it's not? What evidence can you put forth
> to support the idea that pain is not sufficiently described by the way the
> body reacts to it?
>
> --
> Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
> curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/

.

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