I think the texture of coffee smell is just the texture of smelling as such, and probably exists in the different overall type/pattern of noise that exists in olfactory sense compared to other senses. I think the texture of smelling coffee would basically be the same as smelling anything else except to the extent different smells actually activate different sense organs. For example I’m pretty sure that garbage smells are felt much more acutely in the back of the nose/throat than something like coffee but I haven’t done much research on the topic.
That’s not what I mean by “qualia textures”; I mean specific smells, specific colors, specific timbres of sound, the details of how each of them subjectively feel to me (regardless of how it is implemented or of whether I actually have a physical body with sense organs). That’s what your treatment seems to omit.
But, perhaps, this point of the thread might be a good place to ask you again: are you Camp 2 or Camp 1 in the terminology of that LessWrong post?
E.g. Daniel Dennett is Camp 1, Thomas Nagel is Camp 2, Carl Feynman is Camp 1 (and is claiming that he might not have qualia in the sense of Camp 2 people and might be a “P-zombie”, see his comments to that post and his profile), I am Camp 2.
Basically, we now understand that most treatments of these topics only make sense for people of only one of those camps. There are Camp 1 texts and Camp 2 texts, and it seems that there are fundamental reasons for why they can’t cross-penetrate to the other camp.
That’s why that LessWrong post is useful; it saves people from rehashing this Camp 1/Camp 2 difference from ground zero again and again.
I’m purposefully trying to avoid either camp as both camps require a type of dualism. What I’m trying to claim here is that any subjective feeling is only pure difference, even from a purely phenomenological analysis. If you pay attention to any specific sound or sight or smell, all you’re gonna notice are the differences to other such experiences. Any notion of positive, non-differential experience, I claim, is just an illusion created by the difficulty in specifically being aware of all the differences in experience at once. I used references to sense organs just as a means of mapping internal sensations, as well as explain where the noise is coming from. But noise itself is logically impossible without difference, and so if there is noise in our awareness of differences that just points to differences we’re not aware of but still experience.
On the contrary, my introspection is that I do not normally notice those differences at all on the conscious level, I only make use of those differences on the lower level of subconscious processing. What percolates up to my subjective experience is “qualities”, specific “qualia textures”, specific colors, sounds, smells, etc, and my subjective reality is composed of those.
So it looks like the results of our respective introspections do differ drastically.
Perhaps Carl Feynman is correct when he is saying that different people have drastically different subjective realities which are structured in drastically different ways, and that we tend to underestimate how different those subjective realities are, that we tend to assume that other people are more or less like us, when this is actually not the case.
No no, I’m not saying that I myself am actively aware of all difference in my experience, I feel the noise too, but whenever I investigate a phenomenon what I find is that it just gets broken into more difference that I didn’t notice originally. Since noise logically requires difference, you can’t get static without some variation in the signal, and when I investigate I only find more difference, never any positive thing in itself, I can only conclude that the difference extends down to the noise, the texture, and I’m simply not aware of the full extent of the differences.
If you’re speaking of /specific/ colors, sounds and smells, then you’re already acknowledging that you’re differentiating them from other experiences.
I differentiate them when I talk about more than one. But when I focus on one particular “qualia texture”, I mostly ignore existence of others.
The only difference I am aware of in this sense (when I choose to focus on one specific quale) is its presence or absence as the subject of my focus, not of how it differs from other “qualia textures”. If I want to I can start comparing it to other “qualia textures”, but typically I would not do that.
So normally this is the main difference, “now I am focusing on this ‘qualia texture’, and at some earlier point I was not focusing on it”. This is the change which is present.
There is a pre-conscious, pre-qualia level of processing where e.g. contrast correction or color correction apply, so these different things situated near each other do affect each other, but that happens before I am aware of the results, and the results I am aware of already incorporate those corrections.
But no, I actually don’t understand what do you mean when you use the word “noise” in this context. I don’t associate any of this with “noise” (except for the situations when a surface is marked by variations, the sound is unpleasant, and things like that, basically when there are blemishes, or unpleasant connotations, or I actually focus on the “scientific noise phenomena”).
There’s also differentiation in time, and so long as you’re aware that it’s the presence or absence of your focus, then you’re aware it’s differentiated from the rest of your awareness/experience.
However, the specifics of the feeling associated with a particular qualia texture are not captured by this.
Moreover, those specifics do not seem to be captured by how it differs from other qualia textures (because those specifics don’t seem to depend much on the set of other qualia textures I might choose to contrast it with; e.g. on what were the prevailing colors recently, or on whether I have mostly been focusing on audio or on olfactory modality recently, or just on reading; none of that seems to noticeably affect my relationship with a particular shade of red or with the smell of the instant coffee I am using).
Right I’m arguing that the specific differences which fully enable the experience of a qualia are unconscious, and must necessarily be outside of consciousness awareness, that’s what I was talking about wrt to the patterns of qualia and their relations necessarily implying an external phenomenal substance which we are not always aware of.
I think the texture of coffee smell is just the texture of smelling as such, and probably exists in the different overall type/pattern of noise that exists in olfactory sense compared to other senses. I think the texture of smelling coffee would basically be the same as smelling anything else except to the extent different smells actually activate different sense organs. For example I’m pretty sure that garbage smells are felt much more acutely in the back of the nose/throat than something like coffee but I haven’t done much research on the topic.
That’s not what I mean by “qualia textures”; I mean specific smells, specific colors, specific timbres of sound, the details of how each of them subjectively feel to me (regardless of how it is implemented or of whether I actually have a physical body with sense organs). That’s what your treatment seems to omit.
But, perhaps, this point of the thread might be a good place to ask you again: are you Camp 2 or Camp 1 in the terminology of that LessWrong post?
E.g. Daniel Dennett is Camp 1, Thomas Nagel is Camp 2, Carl Feynman is Camp 1 (and is claiming that he might not have qualia in the sense of Camp 2 people and might be a “P-zombie”, see his comments to that post and his profile), I am Camp 2.
Basically, we now understand that most treatments of these topics only make sense for people of only one of those camps. There are Camp 1 texts and Camp 2 texts, and it seems that there are fundamental reasons for why they can’t cross-penetrate to the other camp.
That’s why that LessWrong post is useful; it saves people from rehashing this Camp 1/Camp 2 difference from ground zero again and again.
I’m purposefully trying to avoid either camp as both camps require a type of dualism. What I’m trying to claim here is that any subjective feeling is only pure difference, even from a purely phenomenological analysis. If you pay attention to any specific sound or sight or smell, all you’re gonna notice are the differences to other such experiences. Any notion of positive, non-differential experience, I claim, is just an illusion created by the difficulty in specifically being aware of all the differences in experience at once. I used references to sense organs just as a means of mapping internal sensations, as well as explain where the noise is coming from. But noise itself is logically impossible without difference, and so if there is noise in our awareness of differences that just points to differences we’re not aware of but still experience.
That does not correspond to my introspection.
On the contrary, my introspection is that I do not normally notice those differences at all on the conscious level, I only make use of those differences on the lower level of subconscious processing. What percolates up to my subjective experience is “qualities”, specific “qualia textures”, specific colors, sounds, smells, etc, and my subjective reality is composed of those.
So it looks like the results of our respective introspections do differ drastically.
Perhaps Carl Feynman is correct when he is saying that different people have drastically different subjective realities which are structured in drastically different ways, and that we tend to underestimate how different those subjective realities are, that we tend to assume that other people are more or less like us, when this is actually not the case.
No no, I’m not saying that I myself am actively aware of all difference in my experience, I feel the noise too, but whenever I investigate a phenomenon what I find is that it just gets broken into more difference that I didn’t notice originally. Since noise logically requires difference, you can’t get static without some variation in the signal, and when I investigate I only find more difference, never any positive thing in itself, I can only conclude that the difference extends down to the noise, the texture, and I’m simply not aware of the full extent of the differences.
If you’re speaking of /specific/ colors, sounds and smells, then you’re already acknowledging that you’re differentiating them from other experiences.
I differentiate them when I talk about more than one. But when I focus on one particular “qualia texture”, I mostly ignore existence of others.
The only difference I am aware of in this sense (when I choose to focus on one specific quale) is its presence or absence as the subject of my focus, not of how it differs from other “qualia textures”. If I want to I can start comparing it to other “qualia textures”, but typically I would not do that.
So normally this is the main difference, “now I am focusing on this ‘qualia texture’, and at some earlier point I was not focusing on it”. This is the change which is present.
There is a pre-conscious, pre-qualia level of processing where e.g. contrast correction or color correction apply, so these different things situated near each other do affect each other, but that happens before I am aware of the results, and the results I am aware of already incorporate those corrections.
But no, I actually don’t understand what do you mean when you use the word “noise” in this context. I don’t associate any of this with “noise” (except for the situations when a surface is marked by variations, the sound is unpleasant, and things like that, basically when there are blemishes, or unpleasant connotations, or I actually focus on the “scientific noise phenomena”).
There’s also differentiation in time, and so long as you’re aware that it’s the presence or absence of your focus, then you’re aware it’s differentiated from the rest of your awareness/experience.
Right. But this is what is common for all qualia.
However, the specifics of the feeling associated with a particular qualia texture are not captured by this.
Moreover, those specifics do not seem to be captured by how it differs from other qualia textures (because those specifics don’t seem to depend much on the set of other qualia textures I might choose to contrast it with; e.g. on what were the prevailing colors recently, or on whether I have mostly been focusing on audio or on olfactory modality recently, or just on reading; none of that seems to noticeably affect my relationship with a particular shade of red or with the smell of the instant coffee I am using).
Right I’m arguing that the specific differences which fully enable the experience of a qualia are unconscious, and must necessarily be outside of consciousness awareness, that’s what I was talking about wrt to the patterns of qualia and their relations necessarily implying an external phenomenal substance which we are not always aware of.