PC
Pattern-chaser wrote:If we accept that "sensory experience" implies conscious experience, which seems reasonable, then it is "sensory experience" that is the oxymoron. That is my point.
Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:55 am For the sake of absolute clarity I'd go with - ''Sensory experience'' refers to the phenomenal 'what it is like' experience of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling or tasting something. Here we're talking about the experience of hearing a sound. If you agree, I don't see an oxymoron.
The oxymoron in "sensory experience" is that it's impossible. Sense data cannot be directly received into our conscious minds. It has to be processed in all kinds of different ways before it becomes intelligible to our conscious minds.
As a general point I think it helps to remember that's an abstract conceptualisation of the reality of what's actually going on. Which is air vibrations stimulating our hearing system, which in turn then interacts with our other neural subsystems, and ultimately some of those physical processes also manifest as the experience of hearing a sound, via some mechanism. Somehow that becomes part of our field of consciousness, with focus and attention shifting from moment to moment. to create an ongoing cohesive and coherent model.
Those somehows can't currently be explained, so talk in abstract ways about the physical bodily processes as 'processing and presenting data' to the conscious mind is either a functional metaphor, or a hypothesis about what is actually going on. A hypothesis which if you think it through hasw implications - such as mind-body dualism, where-by physical processes are somehow understood by the separate experiential mind, or perhaps something like a homunculous acting as body-mind interpreter. Whatever, it needs some underlying explanation, which is what I was asking for, because many people would disagree with this idea of physical neural processes 'presenting' processed data to a separate experiencing conscious mind.
And that processing is pre-conscious, so we can't experience anything directly and immediately. We can't consciously experience anything until it has become accessible to our conscious minds. By that time, it's a sensory-based, or sensory-derived, experience, but it cannot be correctly described as a "sensory experience". Once perceived, it is much more than just sense-based.
Yes I think most people would agree our interactions with the actual world result in us manifesting experiential models of that world, rather than directly knowing the world. What we directly know is our own sensory experience. Sound is a good example, it doesn't exist as sound 'out there', it's somehow manifested through our interaction with the world, including air vibrations. The
experience of hearing is called that to distinguish it from the experience of seeing, or the experience of remembering a convo, or imagining a tune in our head, or thinking linguistically about what sound is. It's just a category label for that particular 'flavour' of experience, as opposed to others. But as you say, we aren't directly experiencing what the world out there is really like when we have any type of experience. And I agree the inter-active nature of neurons from different subsystems suggest there might not be such a thing as 'pure hearing' for highly complex critters like humans, as opposed to say a worm which might only have a neural system which only experiences vibrations (if it experiences anything at all).
I'd say that's written in to an informed understanding of what ''sensory experience'' means.
The experience is what is sensory, not the air disturbances. That's not an oxymoron.
Pattern-chaser wrote:There is a strict timeline here. First, our senses detect some event. Then the sensory data are 'processed', in a process we generally refer to as 'perception'. Perception is an unconscious and pre-conscious thing.
Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:55 am OK, I'll go with that as a working definition - here ''perception'' and ''processing'' are only referring to physical brain processes.
Physical in the sense that, as far as we know, the mind and its operations/actions are wholly based upon neuro-bio-chemical brain stuff. I say that because perception is understood by us - even if that understanding is somehow incorrect - as a mental/mind process.
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That's fine,, we're defining ''perception'' as physical brain processes here then
Pattern-chaser wrote: When the process of perception is complete, the resulting, er, perception is offered to the conscious mind, at which time (but not before) it is experienced. The perception is based upon sensory data, without doubt. But the experience is not sensory but perceptual, and conscious too.
Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:55 am This part I have a problem with. The notion that physical brain neurons 'offer' their physical activity (perception) to the conscious mind which is something different ready to 'accept' these physical neural processes and 'experience' them.
Can you unpack that? I can't grasp what that means in practice or as a theory of consciousness?
As far as I know, I'm quoting our current scientific understanding of perception.
If perception is physical neural activity, yes science is getting an increasingly detailed picture of neural processes.
I don't think there's anything radical here. And, as I hopefully made clear in my previous post, I am assuming that "experience" refers to conscious experience. Perception takes place unconsciously and pre-consciously. This means that, when it's complete, the results are offered/passed/transferred to the conscious mind, from the unconscious areas where the processes of perception took place. I can't see how to phrase that more clearly.
I still don't get what you mean by physical neural activity being ''offered'' to the experiencing conscious mind in terms of what's actually going on.
Or how any of this means we can 'hear silence'. Or means dogs can't.