I take the “texture” of qualia to be the noise inherent to the input senses, this noise is essentially the difference between the level of differentiation which exists within our own mind for making sense of things, and the smallest amount of differentiation in the world which our sense are capable of detecting. When you look at a painting, you’ll first get like a gestalt impression based on the largest structures you notice, the biggest shapes and largest color groups, etc. But your eye can detect smaller structures, down to whatever size. Until your brain creates active distinctions on that level, those smaller structures are just noise which /potentially/ can be understood. Without this really existing differentiation beyond comprehension, the texture would also be impossible.
I guess it’s obvious to me I have phenomenal experience but it is not intuitive to me that this is limited to the specific experiences I’m aware of. Furthermore, it’s very important to me that the functional structure exists /within/ phenomenal experience, I can observe internally how my mind differentiates between things and /learns/ how to differentiate. Given any specific, identifiable aspect of my internal state requires it to be differentiated, I assume this differentiation goes all the way down. Hence, this differentiation is not imposed from the outside by a scientific investigation of a physical system. Perhaps my mind is just too corrupted from thinking about semiotics too much, but I believe some of these internal observations should generalize to others experiences given they match neatly onto debates and descriptions of language acquisition.
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 take the “texture” of qualia to be the noise inherent to the input senses, this noise is essentially the difference between the level of differentiation which exists within our own mind for making sense of things, and the smallest amount of differentiation in the world which our sense are capable of detecting. When you look at a painting, you’ll first get like a gestalt impression based on the largest structures you notice, the biggest shapes and largest color groups, etc. But your eye can detect smaller structures, down to whatever size. Until your brain creates active distinctions on that level, those smaller structures are just noise which /potentially/ can be understood. Without this really existing differentiation beyond comprehension, the texture would also be impossible.
I guess it’s obvious to me I have phenomenal experience but it is not intuitive to me that this is limited to the specific experiences I’m aware of. Furthermore, it’s very important to me that the functional structure exists /within/ phenomenal experience, I can observe internally how my mind differentiates between things and /learns/ how to differentiate. Given any specific, identifiable aspect of my internal state requires it to be differentiated, I assume this differentiation goes all the way down. Hence, this differentiation is not imposed from the outside by a scientific investigation of a physical system. Perhaps my mind is just too corrupted from thinking about semiotics too much, but I believe some of these internal observations should generalize to others experiences given they match neatly onto debates and descriptions of language acquisition.
But… is not this noise strangely reproducible from exposure to exposure?
Not perfectly reproducible, but there is a good deal of similarity between, say, “textures” of coffee smells at various times…
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.