Noticing a basketball is forming an accurate mental representation of the basketball. This mental representation is not the basketball. The map is not the territory, the quotation is not the referent. They’re fundamentally different things, no matter how good you are at recognizing basketballs.
Yes, of course.
Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is noticing this mental representation—which again is not the basketball. Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is when you form a mental representation of the fact that you’ve formed a mental representation of the basketball. This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.
On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.) And it is entirely possible that they simply co-occur basically always, as @Richard_Kennawaydescribes.
But especially if Bob were preoccupied he might not have taken note of his obstacle avoidance, might fail to find in his memory a mental representation of this object he did indeed represent at the time, and say—incorrectly—“No, I didn’t notice it”. The fact that he stepped around the basketball is proof that he noticed it. The fact that he said “I didn’t notice it”, doesn’t negate the fact that he noticed it, it shows that he didn’t notice that he noticed the basketball.
On the contrary again: what you are describing here is simply Bob not having noticed the basketball, and then truthfully reporting this fact.
(Note that this is different from the scenario where Bob is not preoccupied, notices the basketball, steps around, but then forgets that this happened; and, when later asked, falsely reports that he did not notice the basketball. In other words, these are what Dennett colorfully described in Consciousness Explained as the “Stalinesque” and “Orwellian” scenarios, respectively.)
This is reminiscent of the famous hypnosis experiment where people were hypnotized and told that a chair placed in their path was invisible. The people instructed to fool the researchers into believing they had been hypnotized all walked into the chair, as one would. The people who were genuinely hypnotized walked around the chair, and when asked why they took the path they did, showed that they had no idea why they did what they did. They had noticed the chair, and not that they had noticed it.
Here you are again describing these people not having noticed the chair.
If you pick up the basketball, and tell the kid you left it on the court, you’ve shown that you’ve both noticed the basketball and also the fact that you noticed the basketball.
If you walk around the basketball, and tell the kid you haven’t seen it, you’ve shown that you’ve noticed the basketball but not the fact that you’ve noticed the basketball.
If you walk right past the basketball wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that you didn’t notice the basketball—and so you can’t have noticed that you noticed
And if you walk around the basketball, wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that…?
The weird part about this is that it can be hard to imagine not noticing. It’s hard to miss a big orange ball on black asphalt, so it’s hard to imagine there being a basketball there and not noticing it. It can seem like the distinction between the ball being there and noticing the ball being there isn’t worth tracking because you’ll never fail to notice it—except in the obvious cases like if it’s a moonless night and you’re blind but that doesn’t count, right?
I have not had this experience (of it being hard to imagine this distinction); it has always been clear to me that it’s important and worth tracking. But of course I am aware that some people do think thus.
Similarly, if the only time you’re looking at your own mental representations, they’re metaphorically big and bright orange against a black background, it’s going to be hard to imagine not noticing them—except for the things that are “unconscious” and therefore “impossible to notice” but you can insist that those “don’t count” either.
Sure. Have you ever noticed individual hydrogen atoms? No? Well, why doesn’t that serve as an example of a thing that you didn’t notice? Because you can’t notice them, of course. (Unless you have one of them fancy quantum microscopes, anyway.)
And similarly, once you start looking for representations that are hard to find, and start finding them where you hadn’t seen them immediately, it gets a lot more obvious that there’s* a lot* of things represented in your mind which you haven’t yet noticed. And that there’s simply too much external reality represented in your head for you to represent all of the object level representations you have.
There are plenty of “low-level” representations in our brains (and auxiliary organs) which are inaccessible to conscious awareness. These are of a different kind than mental representations as we ordinarily think of them. For example, take color vision: would you say that we “notice” the individual lightness values of the three color channels formed by signals from the three types of cone cells in our retina? I think that it would be very silly to say that yes, we notice this information, but we do not notice that we notice it, etc. No, we are simply unaware of it, because our visual cortex begins to combine and transform the color channel information long before it gets anywhere near the processes that we could reasonably describe as constituting any “noticing” of anything whatsoever.
Noticing the basketball and noticing that you have noticed the basketball are fundamentally different things, because basketballs and noticing basketballs are fundamentally different things.
Consequent does not follow from antecedent. A mental representation is the same kind of thing as another mental representation.
(Computer science analogy: NSString is a different kind of thing from NSString*. But NSString* and NSString** are the same kind of thing, and so is NSString***, NSSTring****, etc.)
(Of course, you need to know about NSString** to understand the pattern, otherwise you might think that there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to objects. It’s once you go to that second level of indirection that you realize that actually, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and …]]]… or, in other words, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to things. Thus also with mental representations: to establish the recursion, you must have mental representations of mental representations… at which point you realize that there are two kinds of things: stuff out there in reality, and mental representations of things.)
The same applies to anyone who thinks they see everything their mind is representing and responding to.
“Blindsight, but for social cues” is the grand revelation that all of this has been leading up to…?
>>This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.
>On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.)
“No, your car and my car aren’t different things! The fact that yours is an actual car and mine is a cardboard cutout shaped to represent one is irrelevant because they’re both physical objects so they’re the same kind of thing! Which is all that really matters, since distinctions don’t exist as long as similarities do, and they can be used interchangeably! Don’t mind if I swap you, like for like...”
Okay, I see how you manage to not get it. This is really blatant. I guess I’m just going to have to curse you as a rat bastard and remember what standards you hold for yourself.
Yes, of course.
On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.) And it is entirely possible that they simply co-occur basically always, as @Richard_Kennaway describes.
On the contrary again: what you are describing here is simply Bob not having noticed the basketball, and then truthfully reporting this fact.
(Note that this is different from the scenario where Bob is not preoccupied, notices the basketball, steps around, but then forgets that this happened; and, when later asked, falsely reports that he did not notice the basketball. In other words, these are what Dennett colorfully described in Consciousness Explained as the “Stalinesque” and “Orwellian” scenarios, respectively.)
Here you are again describing these people not having noticed the chair.
And if you walk around the basketball, wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that…?
I have not had this experience (of it being hard to imagine this distinction); it has always been clear to me that it’s important and worth tracking. But of course I am aware that some people do think thus.
Sure. Have you ever noticed individual hydrogen atoms? No? Well, why doesn’t that serve as an example of a thing that you didn’t notice? Because you can’t notice them, of course. (Unless you have one of them fancy quantum microscopes, anyway.)
There are plenty of “low-level” representations in our brains (and auxiliary organs) which are inaccessible to conscious awareness. These are of a different kind than mental representations as we ordinarily think of them. For example, take color vision: would you say that we “notice” the individual lightness values of the three color channels formed by signals from the three types of cone cells in our retina? I think that it would be very silly to say that yes, we notice this information, but we do not notice that we notice it, etc. No, we are simply unaware of it, because our visual cortex begins to combine and transform the color channel information long before it gets anywhere near the processes that we could reasonably describe as constituting any “noticing” of anything whatsoever.
Consequent does not follow from antecedent. A mental representation is the same kind of thing as another mental representation.
(Computer science analogy:
NSStringis a different kind of thing fromNSString*. ButNSString*andNSString**are the same kind of thing, and so isNSString***,NSSTring****, etc.)(Of course, you need to know about
NSString**to understand the pattern, otherwise you might think that there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to objects. It’s once you go to that second level of indirection that you realize that actually, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and …]]]… or, in other words, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to things. Thus also with mental representations: to establish the recursion, you must have mental representations of mental representations… at which point you realize that there are two kinds of things: stuff out there in reality, and mental representations of things.)“Blindsight, but for social cues” is the grand revelation that all of this has been leading up to…?
>>This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.
>On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.)
“No, your car and my car aren’t different things! The fact that yours is an actual car and mine is a cardboard cutout shaped to represent one is irrelevant because they’re both physical objects so they’re the same kind of thing! Which is all that really matters, since distinctions don’t exist as long as similarities do, and they can be used interchangeably! Don’t mind if I swap you, like for like...”
Okay, I see how you manage to not get it. This is really blatant. I guess I’m just going to have to curse you as a rat bastard and remember what standards you hold for yourself.
Let me know if they change.