How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Sy Borg wrote:
So, when a mammal dies - be it a possum or a human - the nature of the animal's reactivity becomes reflexive and more chaotic as new communities of microbes take over the cadaver.

"more chaotic":
if relative chaos defines the states of life or not-life of a mammal then those are a matter of degree of reactivity to its environment. The states of life or not-life of a saprophyte or a saprophyte colony must then be a matter of degree, for there is no reason mammals be deemed special cases. Relative states of life or death would be the case but for one variable ---------------

"reflexive" :

Reflexivity is a kind of reaction but isn't a degree of reaction; either an experience is reflexive or it's intentional, all or nothing. Saprophytes and other tiny organisms such as bacteria 'intend ' to survive and if they did not ' intend' to survive they would not be viable for long but would succumb to a more efficient colony. Tiny organisms are clusters of experiences contrasted with my table lamp which experiences only on or off and is truly reflexive.

The table lamp or any other machine , unlike bacteria or mammals, does not care whether or not it's on or off. Our caring whether or not we living animals are on or off is due to what we call quality (or qualia) and is a difference in kind from that of the machine which does not care. A functioning machine is never chaotic , but If there were ever any question a machine did care whether or not it was on or off that machine should be accorded rights. That is why qualia matter.
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Belindi wrote: May 24th, 2022, 3:58 am Sy Borg wrote:
So, when a mammal dies - be it a possum or a human - the nature of the animal's reactivity becomes reflexive and more chaotic as new communities of microbes take over the cadaver.

"more chaotic":
if relative chaos defines the states of life or not-life of a mammal then those are a matter of degree of reactivity to its environment. The states of life or not-life of a saprophyte or a saprophyte colony must then be a matter of degree, for there is no reason mammals be deemed special cases. Relative states of life or death would be the case but for one variable ---------------

"reflexive" :

Reflexivity is a kind of reaction but isn't a degree of reaction; either an experience is reflexive or it's intentional, all or nothing. Saprophytes and other tiny organisms such as bacteria 'intend ' to survive and if they did not ' intend' to survive they would not be viable for long but would succumb to a more efficient colony. Tiny organisms are clusters of experiences contrasted with my table lamp which experiences only on or off and is truly reflexive.

The table lamp or any other machine , unlike bacteria or mammals, does not care whether or not it's on or off. Our caring whether or not we living animals are on or off is due to what we call quality (or qualia) and is a difference in kind from that of the machine which does not care. A functioning machine is never chaotic , but If there were ever any question a machine did care whether or not it was on or off that machine should be accorded rights. That is why qualia matter.
Then again, we enjoy switching off every night. Further, our very best times tend to be flow states where the self is mostly sublimated. For a while we become the task, presumably like other animals.

I chose "mammal" because the gulf between them and "cadaver communities" is greater than the difference between, say, a living starfish and a decomposing starfish.

As for the simplest organisms striving to stay alive, it was not always so. The first life would have had no drive to survive, like a machine. However, as different communities formed, the ones that could find resources and avoid threats would have out-competed communities that were chaotic. As mentality emerged, the survival urge was increasingly selected, and now humans tend to think of death like this:

Image
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Sy Borg wrote: May 24th, 2022, 7:28 am
Belindi wrote: May 24th, 2022, 3:58 am Sy Borg wrote:
So, when a mammal dies - be it a possum or a human - the nature of the animal's reactivity becomes reflexive and more chaotic as new communities of microbes take over the cadaver.

"more chaotic":
if relative chaos defines the states of life or not-life of a mammal then those are a matter of degree of reactivity to its environment. The states of life or not-life of a saprophyte or a saprophyte colony must then be a matter of degree, for there is no reason mammals be deemed special cases. Relative states of life or death would be the case but for one variable ---------------

"reflexive" :

Reflexivity is a kind of reaction but isn't a degree of reaction; either an experience is reflexive or it's intentional, all or nothing. Saprophytes and other tiny organisms such as bacteria 'intend ' to survive and if they did not ' intend' to survive they would not be viable for long but would succumb to a more efficient colony. Tiny organisms are clusters of experiences contrasted with my table lamp which experiences only on or off and is truly reflexive.

The table lamp or any other machine , unlike bacteria or mammals, does not care whether or not it's on or off. Our caring whether or not we living animals are on or off is due to what we call quality (or qualia) and is a difference in kind from that of the machine which does not care. A functioning machine is never chaotic , but If there were ever any question a machine did care whether or not it was on or off that machine should be accorded rights. That is why qualia matter.
Then again, we enjoy switching off every night. Further, our very best times tend to be flow states where the self is mostly sublimated. For a while we become the task, presumably like other animals.

I chose "mammal" because the gulf between them and "cadaver communities" is greater than the difference between, say, a living starfish and a decomposing starfish.

As for the simplest organisms striving to stay alive, it was not always so. The first life would have had no drive to survive, like a machine. However, as different communities formed, the ones that could find resources and avoid threats would have out-competed communities that were chaotic. As mentality emerged, the survival urge was increasingly selected, and now humans tend to think of death like this:

Image
"For a time we become the task": yes it's a blessed experience! I am not sure that it isn't future- oriented as an experience. Compare the sort of dream where you are endeavouring to do some task with the sort of dream where you are like someone watching a film play without participating in it, and you find even when you are passive you are expecting events to proceed from past to future. Maybe not: I do and I wonder what the usual experience of the direction of time is, in dreams.
The task we become on these pleasant occasions is a dynamic task. Nature is dynamic. God Himself is dynamic.

I understand why you chose mammals as your example. Thanks.
I stand corrected about the quality of early organisms' lack of experience of quality .
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Belindi wrote: May 25th, 2022, 2:27 pm
Sy Borg wrote: May 24th, 2022, 7:28 am
Belindi wrote: May 24th, 2022, 3:58 am Sy Borg wrote:
So, when a mammal dies - be it a possum or a human - the nature of the animal's reactivity becomes reflexive and more chaotic as new communities of microbes take over the cadaver.

"more chaotic":
if relative chaos defines the states of life or not-life of a mammal then those are a matter of degree of reactivity to its environment. The states of life or not-life of a saprophyte or a saprophyte colony must then be a matter of degree, for there is no reason mammals be deemed special cases. Relative states of life or death would be the case but for one variable ---------------

"reflexive" :

Reflexivity is a kind of reaction but isn't a degree of reaction; either an experience is reflexive or it's intentional, all or nothing. Saprophytes and other tiny organisms such as bacteria 'intend ' to survive and if they did not ' intend' to survive they would not be viable for long but would succumb to a more efficient colony. Tiny organisms are clusters of experiences contrasted with my table lamp which experiences only on or off and is truly reflexive.

The table lamp or any other machine , unlike bacteria or mammals, does not care whether or not it's on or off. Our caring whether or not we living animals are on or off is due to what we call quality (or qualia) and is a difference in kind from that of the machine which does not care. A functioning machine is never chaotic , but If there were ever any question a machine did care whether or not it was on or off that machine should be accorded rights. That is why qualia matter.
Then again, we enjoy switching off every night. Further, our very best times tend to be flow states where the self is mostly sublimated. For a while we become the task, presumably like other animals.

I chose "mammal" because the gulf between them and "cadaver communities" is greater than the difference between, say, a living starfish and a decomposing starfish.

As for the simplest organisms striving to stay alive, it was not always so. The first life would have had no drive to survive, like a machine. However, as different communities formed, the ones that could find resources and avoid threats would have out-competed communities that were chaotic. As mentality emerged, the survival urge was increasingly selected, and now humans tend to think of death like this:

Image
"For a time we become the task": yes it's a blessed experience! I am not sure that it isn't future- oriented as an experience. Compare the sort of dream where you are endeavouring to do some task with the sort of dream where you are like someone watching a film play without participating in it, and you find even when you are passive you are expecting events to proceed from past to future. Maybe not: I do and I wonder what the usual experience of the direction of time is, in dreams.
The task we become on these pleasant occasions is a dynamic task. Nature is dynamic. God Himself is dynamic.

I understand why you chose mammals as your example. Thanks.
I stand corrected about the quality of early organisms' lack of experience of quality .
I like that observation "I am not sure that it isn't future- oriented as an experience"! When I look back at my flow states when playing in bands, there was definitely more "future in my mind" than usual, which would otherwise be centred in the moment, thinking about what happened earlier in the song, or distracted altogether.

Being "in the now", without being drawn forward by a vision of the future (in this case, the next bar of music), feels chaotic. It's as though one is always playing catch-up, just behind the pace.

Conversely, when a particularly difficult or fun part of a song is coming up, it's easy to lose the present too much and over-focus on the challenge ahead. What happens there is that the bars of music leading up to the tricky passage are not given due attention and then, when the passage arrives, there is a jump into the chaotic present, dragged by the past as you assess how the passage is going as you play.

The Judge - the part of your mind that looks backward - has no place on the performance stage. That's why recording performances is so helpful - assessments can be partitioned away from the performance.

It comes down to having a goal that drives you forward. The "immediate future" seems more important to a flow state than the the "far future". It's more like being the donkey walking after a carrot dangled in front of them than the donkey's rider, fixated on the eventual destination.

I'd better stop, this is more about the quality and functionality of qualia than questioning qualia as a concept. Still, thanks for that insight, Belinda. It's clarified a few things up for me.
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Sy Borg wrote: May 24th, 2022, 7:28 am As for the simplest organisms striving to stay alive, it was not always so. The first life would have had no drive to survive, like a machine. However, as different communities formed, the ones that could find resources and avoid threats would have out-competed communities that were chaotic. As mentality emerged, the survival urge was increasingly selected, and now humans tend to think of death like this:
You argue that some forms of life, specifically early or simple life, did not have the quality 'drive to survive' and were like a machine.

Can you please explain how you reached such a perspective?

A machine cannot produce something that is not a machine and therefore it would become at question how can it be said that a human is not a machine. I noticed your care for animals, so I wonder how it is possible to consider simple life to be a machine.
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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JackDaydream wrote: December 13th, 2021, 9:17 am I have been reading Daniel Dennett on the concept of qualia. He suggests that 'philosophers have tied themselves into knots over qualia. They started where anyone would start: with the clearest intuitions about their own minds. Those intuitions, alas, form a mutually self-supporting circle of doctrines, imprisoning their imaginations in the Cartesian Theater. Even though philosophers have discovered the paradoxes inherent in this closed circle of ideas_ that is why the literature gets more and more convoluted, instead of convuluting agreement.'


The idea of qualia was first introduced in philosophy by
CI Lewis in 1929. However, it is a complex area, so I raise it for consideration. To what extent is it useful, or does it blur and fuzz over issues to do with perception and what constitutes reality?
Wiki wrote:In philosophy of mind, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkʷaːlɪs]) meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple — this particular apple now".

Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to propositional attitudes,[1] where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that qualia was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us".[2]

Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition of the term, and various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain features of qualia. Consequently, the nature and existence of qualia under various definitions remain controversial. While some philosophers of mind like Daniel Dennett argue that qualia do not exist and are incompatible with neuroscience and naturalism,[3][4] some neuroscientists and neurologists like Gerald Edelman, Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch and Rodolfo Llinás state that qualia exist and that the desire to eliminate them is based on an erroneous interpretation on the part of some philosophers regarding what constitutes science.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][excessive citations]
It appears that there is no scientific evidence of qualia in the same way as there is no scientific evidence of consciousness. I think that should motivate neuroscience to reveal the illusion of both.
mankind ... must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them [Hume]
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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snt wrote: June 8th, 2022, 10:09 am
Sy Borg wrote: May 24th, 2022, 7:28 am As for the simplest organisms striving to stay alive, it was not always so. The first life would have had no drive to survive, like a machine. However, as different communities formed, the ones that could find resources and avoid threats would have out-competed communities that were chaotic. As mentality emerged, the survival urge was increasingly selected, and now humans tend to think of death like this:
You argue that some forms of life, specifically early or simple life, did not have the quality 'drive to survive' and were like a machine.

Can you please explain how you reached such a perspective?

A machine cannot produce something that is not a machine and therefore it would become at question how can it be said that a human is not a machine. I noticed your care for animals, so I wonder how it is possible to consider simple life to be a machine.
Fair concerns. Yep, life forms are not "biological machines", as they are often called. Rather, machines are a weak imitation of life - so far, anyway.

It's the lack of drive to survive that I see as machinelike. Machines don't care what you do to them, and neither would early life have cared.

The very first life forms would have been quite similar to their non-living precursors. Life may have had a number of false starts - but all of that proto-life would have basically been genetic material and a simple metabolism, and a lipid coating would have held the parts in. At first, replication fidelity would have been poor, not enough to carry on the line. Then our universal LUCA got it right and the rest is history. They would have been the simplest organisms ever, with complexities added via natural selection, so they would have presumably had no survival reflexes, unlike almost all of its ancestors.
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Sy Borg wrote: June 8th, 2022, 9:45 pm Fair concerns. Yep, life forms are not "biological machines", as they are often called. Rather, machines are a weak imitation of life - so far, anyway.

It's the lack of drive to survive that I see as machinelike. Machines don't care what you do to them, and neither would early life have cared.

The very first life forms would have been quite similar to their non-living precursors. Life may have had a number of false starts - but all of that proto-life would have basically been genetic material and a simple metabolism, and a lipid coating would have held the parts in. At first, replication fidelity would have been poor, not enough to carry on the line. Then our universal LUCA got it right and the rest is history. They would have been the simplest organisms ever, with complexities added via natural selection, so they would have presumably had no survival reflexes, unlike almost all of its ancestors.
I would beg to differ. No matter how primitive, life without a drive to survive cannot be considered living.

The idea that you describe seems to originate from false marketing by scientists that attempt to insist on the idea that life started at random in a complex primordial soup, according to Darwin's evolution theory.

When you would look deeper into the matter you will notice the nonsensical nature of the ideas that have been presented in science journals as being 'evidence' of the chemical origin of life in a primordial soup.

The lipid coating that you describe gave it away. The idea originates from decades of false marketing.

An example:

"When origin-of-life researchers call the result "protocells", no life or pre-life exists. It remains lipid bilayer vesicles in water.

One of many recent examples, published in 2017, of standard chemistry being portrayed as having something to do with the construction of a livinc cell. A team from the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard University performed a known type of polymerization reacton in water, called Reversible Addition-Framentation Chain Transfer (RAFT). This reaction type is not seen in nature - it is a purely synthetic process. The monomers that the research team chose are all synthetic and unnatural.
...
While they kept the radical chain growing through ultraviolet light activation the vesicles grew, consuming monomer within the vesicles, to the point where the vesicles would burst. Again, nothing surprising...
...
Chemists like myself find this type of polymerization reaction to be interesting. It was a fine job by the researchers and well-worth publishing. The claims should have ended there. But here is how the work was portrayed in the global media.

-- citation of press release --
The data supports an interpretation in terms of a micron scale self-assembled molecular system capable of embodying and mimicking some aspects of "simple" extant life, including self-assembly from a homogenous but active chemical medium, membrane formation, metabolism, a primitive form of self-replication and hints of elementary system selection due to a spontaneous light triggered Maragoni instability.

Was that statement justified? Just because A "reminds" me of B, it does not make A an "embodying" form of B - it is just my imagination.

If the disc-shaped vesicle "reminds one" of a flying saucer, is it a "simple extant" flying saucer? No extant life, not even simple extant life, was demonstrated.

Following those excessive extrapolations by the authors of the study, the claims were then rephrased and projected to the lay public by the Harvard Gazette and other news outlets:

-- Harvard Gazette towards lay public --
A Harvard researcher seeking a model for the earliest cells has created a system that self-assembles from a chemical soup into cell-like structures that grow, move in response to light, replicate, and exhibit signs of rudimentary evolutionary selection.

Is that an accurate representation of the article? Surely not.
"

In reality, the described lipid vesicle coating of life cells contains hundreds of trillions of glycans (polycarbohydrate appendages) that are vital for cell regulation. For example, just six repeat units of the carbohydrage D-pyranose can form more than one trillion different hexamers and the diversity in branching patterns store information about the state of the cell and that information storage capacity is much greater than both DNA and RNA combined can store.

Furthermore, in nature, glycans are not made using a gentic template but result from the activity of several hundreds of enzymes organized in complex pathways - these are super-hard to construct and their structures selectively morph throughout cellular life.

There are many other aspects of the lipid vesicle that implies that it cannot have formed at random in a primordial chemical soup.
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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The whole point of a coating is to keep the insides in. Life requires a boundary between its metabolism and reproductive material and its environment. The details of how the insides are separated from the outsides is not important in context.

I'm not sure how the technical material above supports your key assertion that "life without a drive to survive cannot be considered living". A question: do you think that the drive to survive is a product of natural selection?
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Sy Borg wrote: June 9th, 2022, 1:49 am The whole point of a coating is to keep the insides in. Life requires a boundary between its metabolism and reproductive material and its environment. The details of how the insides are separated from the outsides is not important in context.

I'm not sure how the technical material above supports your key assertion that "life without a drive to survive cannot be considered living". A question: do you think that the drive to survive is a product of natural selection?
i'd claim that boundary between a living entity and its environment is the definition of both physiological and psychological conatus, and without which the entity and its environment would be dust to dust .
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Belindi wrote: June 9th, 2022, 4:05 am
Sy Borg wrote: June 9th, 2022, 1:49 am The whole point of a coating is to keep the insides in. Life requires a boundary between its metabolism and reproductive material and its environment. The details of how the insides are separated from the outsides is not important in context.

I'm not sure how the technical material above supports your key assertion that "life without a drive to survive cannot be considered living". A question: do you think that the drive to survive is a product of natural selection?
i'd claim that boundary between a living entity and its environment is the definition of both physiological and psychological conatus, and without which the entity and its environment would be dust to dust .
What of a rock's hardness, which also resists entropy?
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Sy Borg wrote: June 9th, 2022, 4:32 am
Belindi wrote: June 9th, 2022, 4:05 am
Sy Borg wrote: June 9th, 2022, 1:49 am The whole point of a coating is to keep the insides in. Life requires a boundary between its metabolism and reproductive material and its environment. The details of how the insides are separated from the outsides is not important in context.

I'm not sure how the technical material above supports your key assertion that "life without a drive to survive cannot be considered living". A question: do you think that the drive to survive is a product of natural selection?
i'd claim that boundary between a living entity and its environment is the definition of both physiological and psychological conatus, and without which the entity and its environment would be dust to dust .
What of a rock's hardness, which also resists entropy?
Yes but a rock is passive so it's already dust awaiting its fate to happen so to speak. A rock exerts no energy to maintain its separate integrity, whereas an amoeba does metabolise stuff from its environment.
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Belindi wrote: June 9th, 2022, 5:43 am
Sy Borg wrote: June 9th, 2022, 4:32 am
Belindi wrote: June 9th, 2022, 4:05 am
Sy Borg wrote: June 9th, 2022, 1:49 am The whole point of a coating is to keep the insides in. Life requires a boundary between its metabolism and reproductive material and its environment. The details of how the insides are separated from the outsides is not important in context.

I'm not sure how the technical material above supports your key assertion that "life without a drive to survive cannot be considered living". A question: do you think that the drive to survive is a product of natural selection?
i'd claim that boundary between a living entity and its environment is the definition of both physiological and psychological conatus, and without which the entity and its environment would be dust to dust .
What of a rock's hardness, which also resists entropy?
Yes but a rock is passive so it's already dust awaiting its fate to happen so to speak. A rock exerts no energy to maintain its separate integrity, whereas an amoeba does metabolise stuff from its environment.
The rock is replete with potential energy, which resists entropy rather well. There are a range of ways that entities resist entropy. Like life, stars resist entropy via active processes within (nuclear fission and fusion), which prevent its immense bulk of plasma from collapsing in on itself.

Metabolisms are clearly necessary for small, watery entities to persist in reality. Without metabolic processes, biology quickly gives way to entropy and the stuff dissipates.

Considering boundaries, we humans tend to be about as pragmatic as any other animal. We technically consider our skin to be our boundary, but it's only one possible definition. Like planets, we life forms have a thin "atmosphere" consisting of radiation, gases and evaporated fluids exudes from our pores and a "microbial cloud", which is an extension of the microbiome, and is apparently as individual as fingerprints. There is also a magnetic field.

Being pragmatic, we tend to delineate our boundaries based on that which is solid. But in ontic terms, the clouds and fields around us are part of us, just as the atmosphere and magnetic fields are part of the Earth, but are not counted when measuring the Earth's diameter and mass - again, for pragmatic reasons.

The ontic (impractical) view, for some reason is often more important to me than practicalities, much to the frustration of those I deal with :) For instance, if we include the atmosphere as being part of the Earth rather than a (permanent) emanation, then we are not living on the Earth, but in it, which emphasises that humans and other life forms are part of the planet, not optional extras that live on the planet.

Likewise, the concept of qualia has value in treating the internal sensation of processing information as a phenomenon rather than an illusion.
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

Post by Belindi »

Sy Borg wrote: June 9th, 2022, 9:11 pm
Belindi wrote: June 9th, 2022, 5:43 am
Sy Borg wrote: June 9th, 2022, 4:32 am
Belindi wrote: June 9th, 2022, 4:05 am

i'd claim that boundary between a living entity and its environment is the definition of both physiological and psychological conatus, and without which the entity and its environment would be dust to dust .
What of a rock's hardness, which also resists entropy?
Yes but a rock is passive so it's already dust awaiting its fate to happen so to speak. A rock exerts no energy to maintain its separate integrity, whereas an amoeba does metabolise stuff from its environment.
The rock is replete with potential energy, which resists entropy rather well. There are a range of ways that entities resist entropy. Like life, stars resist entropy via active processes within (nuclear fission and fusion), which prevent its immense bulk of plasma from collapsing in on itself.

Metabolisms are clearly necessary for small, watery entities to persist in reality. Without metabolic processes, biology quickly gives way to entropy and the stuff dissipates.

Considering boundaries, we humans tend to be about as pragmatic as any other animal. We technically consider our skin to be our boundary, but it's only one possible definition. Like planets, we life forms have a thin "atmosphere" consisting of radiation, gases and evaporated fluids exudes from our pores and a "microbial cloud", which is an extension of the microbiome, and is apparently as individual as fingerprints. There is also a magnetic field.

Being pragmatic, we tend to delineate our boundaries based on that which is solid. But in ontic terms, the clouds and fields around us are part of us, just as the atmosphere and magnetic fields are part of the Earth, but are not counted when measuring the Earth's diameter and mass - again, for pragmatic reasons.

The ontic (impractical) view, for some reason is often more important to me than practicalities, much to the frustration of those I deal with :) For instance, if we include the atmosphere as being part of the Earth rather than a (permanent) emanation, then we are not living on the Earth, but in it, which emphasises that humans and other life forms are part of the planet, not optional extras that live on the planet.

Likewise, the concept of qualia has value in treating the internal sensation of processing information as a phenomenon rather than an illusion.
Might I then claim that whereas the rock is replete with potential energy it doesn't exist by means of kinetic energy as do we and amoebas? If an earthquake cause a rock to fall the rock does not try to resist gravity as would we but maybe not certain other watery organisms. In this connection ,is there an ontic difference between a live dog and a dog that has metamorphosed into a dead dog, as both are watery organisms?

Your "ontic (impractical) view" is important to me too. It is basically religious in the sense of existential narratives we tell each other. I used to go to a Unitarian church and can well imagine the minister doing sermons like your gestalt and wholistic vision, if the minister had known the sort of science you know. Your vision has ethical implications.

Your ultimate evaluation of qualia I accept whole heartedly.

Does your liking for panpsychism extend to rocks and/or artefacts?
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Re: How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

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Belindi wrote: June 10th, 2022, 3:57 am
Sy Borg wrote: June 9th, 2022, 9:11 pm
Belindi wrote: June 9th, 2022, 5:43 am
Sy Borg wrote: June 9th, 2022, 4:32 am
What of a rock's hardness, which also resists entropy?
Yes but a rock is passive so it's already dust awaiting its fate to happen so to speak. A rock exerts no energy to maintain its separate integrity, whereas an amoeba does metabolise stuff from its environment.
The rock is replete with potential energy, which resists entropy rather well. There are a range of ways that entities resist entropy. Like life, stars resist entropy via active processes within (nuclear fission and fusion), which prevent its immense bulk of plasma from collapsing in on itself.

Metabolisms are clearly necessary for small, watery entities to persist in reality. Without metabolic processes, biology quickly gives way to entropy and the stuff dissipates.

Considering boundaries, we humans tend to be about as pragmatic as any other animal. We technically consider our skin to be our boundary, but it's only one possible definition. Like planets, we life forms have a thin "atmosphere" consisting of radiation, gases and evaporated fluids exudes from our pores and a "microbial cloud", which is an extension of the microbiome, and is apparently as individual as fingerprints. There is also a magnetic field.

Being pragmatic, we tend to delineate our boundaries based on that which is solid. But in ontic terms, the clouds and fields around us are part of us, just as the atmosphere and magnetic fields are part of the Earth, but are not counted when measuring the Earth's diameter and mass - again, for pragmatic reasons.

The ontic (impractical) view, for some reason is often more important to me than practicalities, much to the frustration of those I deal with :) For instance, if we include the atmosphere as being part of the Earth rather than a (permanent) emanation, then we are not living on the Earth, but in it, which emphasises that humans and other life forms are part of the planet, not optional extras that live on the planet.

Likewise, the concept of qualia has value in treating the internal sensation of processing information as a phenomenon rather than an illusion.
Might I then claim that whereas the rock is replete with potential energy it doesn't exist by means of kinetic energy as do we and amoebas? If an earthquake cause a rock to fall the rock does not try to resist gravity as would we but maybe not certain other watery organisms. In this connection ,is there an ontic difference between a live dog and a dog that has metamorphosed into a dead dog, as both are watery organisms?

Your "ontic (impractical) view" is important to me too. It is basically religious in the sense of existential narratives we tell each other. I used to go to a Unitarian church and can well imagine the minister doing sermons like your gestalt and wholistic vision, if the minister had known the sort of science you know. Your vision has ethical implications.

Your ultimate evaluation of qualia I accept whole heartedly.

Does your liking for panpsychism extend to rocks and/or artefacts?
I am more panvitalist than panpsychic. While there have clearly been major emergences in evolution - abiogenesis and brains - I am not convinced that these are absolute. That is, while there are strict cutoffs between alive and not alive, conscious and non-conscious, I don't think they are absolute, rather exponential leaps. It's the difference between a pebble and Uluru, between a puddle and a lake.

So life displays exponentially more dynamism and responsiveness than rocks, but a rock is still minimally responsive, exchanging electrons at its surface with the environment.

This raises the question regarding a particular very large rock about 12,000ks in diameter, that sprouted life and consciousness. Given the tendency for everything to, barring disruption, integrate more deeply, it seems the Earth as a whole is doing that, becoming ever more conscious. Anthropocentric thinkers will dispute this because they see humans as separate from the Earth - "other" beings that live on the Earth and are taking control of the Earth - rather than being one part of it (presumably its brain equivalent).
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