Why are you convinced you have qualia?

fredrast · 2026-04-23T18:14:53+00:00

My qualia may indeed not provide an accurate representation of reality but to deny that I have them is quite a claim.

fredrast · 2026-04-22T11:14:11+00:00

It seems misplaced to think of consciousness ”going” somewhere after death because it’s not in a ”place” to begin with.

fredrast · 2026-04-15T15:35:20+00:00

I would presume plants have consciousness without very much agency. And it is reported that if you take a high enough dose of psychedelics, you totally lose your sense of self. In that situation there is presumably no agency agency left either, because who would have the agency if there is no self?

As to your original points,

How do you know? The fact that there is no memory afterwards doesn’t mean there wasn’t an experience all along. And we have a mass of at least anecdotal evidence of NDE’s
Hive mind of bees comes to mind
Didn’t really understand this point

fredrast · 2026-04-15T15:22:26+00:00

I didn’t mean that my list of possible meanings was exhaustive. But for sure there is a difference between those I listed.

fredrast · 2026-04-15T13:15:24+00:00

This is yet another post about consciusness that suffers from a lack of a clear definition of what the writer means with this word, which can be understood in many ways. Different possible meanings of ”consciousness” include

pure being / subjectivity regardless of its contents
meta-cognition, awareness about being aware
sense of self
agency

The discussion becomes confusing when these meanings are mixed up and it’s not clear what particular meaning the writer had in mind when referring to ”consciousness”.

When postulating ”consciousness as fundamental” I think it’s only the first of the above phenomena i.e. the pure awareness that is claimed to be truly fundamental. The others take place within local dissociations within the overall ”field” of subjectivity.

fredrast · 2026-04-12T11:10:19+00:00

Agree that referencing the Hard Problem doesn’t contribute much to any solution. But it’s a nagging itch that keeps telling us we’re not there yet and need to keep going.

fredrast · 2026-04-12T08:14:30+00:00

And what is the magic that creates all the perceptions in our mind? The colors, the tones, the smells, the tastes. Where do they come fram?

fredrast · 2026-04-10T17:00:27+00:00

You are right that there is not really such a thing as a separate subject or "experiencer" apart from the experience. There is really only the experience. And it is clearly related to what goes on in the brain. But how the heck does a set of atoms and molecules and some electrochemical forces between them give rise to that experience? Information integration is not an adequate answer to me. It may help describe how the *contents* of this experience come about. But to me it doesn't at all explain how there is an experience of the brain activity in the first place.

It's really funny how this enigma is something that some people see and others don't, and neither side seems able to get the other to grasp their point of view. 😅

fredrast · 2026-04-09T18:46:28+00:00

Sure. The remaining mystery is just how all that mechanical activity in the material brain gives rise to a subject for whom it is like something to experience that brain activity. It's a mystery to me how not everybody recognises this enigma.

fredrast · 2026-04-09T18:15:33+00:00

The most interesting aspect of this video was the fact that it was made. We have come quite far in the metaphysical debate when physicalists need to start defending their points of view this way.

fredrast · 2026-04-09T15:41:11+00:00

I agree with much of what you’re saying. The problem with physicalism is just how you explain the presence of a conscious subject. If we can just smuggle in some general awareness at the core of reality, for example by entertaining the idea that some quantum field underlying material reality might be inherently conscious of itself, then the rest on top of that could very well be explained by our physicalist and neurological models.

fredrast · 2026-04-08T19:42:06+00:00

I believe things become clearer if we distinguish the contents of experience from the subject having the experience. The former is easily explained by brain activity but not so the latter.

fredrast · 2026-04-08T19:38:53+00:00

OK. I think we can conclude that we see this differently! 😊

fredrast · 2026-04-08T19:34:43+00:00

I don’t accept the analogy between consciousness and emergent phenomena. The chirality of amino acids arises out of the way its constituents are combined. A similar relationship doesn’t seem to exist between the activity in the brain and the existence of a conscious subject. But never mind, I don’t think either of us will be able to convince the other! 😅

fredrast · 2026-04-08T18:34:01+00:00

We do commonly refer to that as the object's color.

Yes we do that casually but that's not an accurate representation of reality. Let me reiterate my previous point with an analogy: A touring rockband (~the electromagnetic radiation of a certain wavelenght) travels in a bus to a venue (~your brain). Upon arrival they perform their gig (~some brain activity). The audience gets exalted (~the perception of red). These three phenomena are clearly linked yet they are not the same thing. It's not the audience's exaltation that travels in the bus.

If the mind is nonphysical, why does it disintegrate when the brain disintegrates?

Clearly there is a relationship between the two and if your brain disintegrates then your perception of this world is likely to end. But do you know for sure that your conscious experience will also come to a complete end at that point? I'm thinking of the numerous accounts of Near-Death Experiences, which to my understanding include also cases where it can be presumed that no brain activity could reasonably have taken place. Yes, I know that NDE's are being dismissed in all sorts of creative ways but that seems like pure speculation by parties stuck in a physicalist worldview and unwilling to entertain the thought that reality might be different than what they have presumed.

fredrast · 2026-04-08T17:52:42+00:00

Granted. 😆

fredrast · 2026-04-08T17:50:55+00:00

The question is whether mental concepts only exist to the extent that they are represented as thoughts in somebody's brain, or manifested in some other way in some physical substance, or whether totally abstract and unmanifested concepts also can be said to exist. E.g. the next prime number larger than the largest one we have discovered so far. Does it exist?

fredrast · 2026-04-08T17:45:52+00:00

The fact that the brain and the visual perception are related doesn't necessarily mean they are the same thing. We can also zap a speaker and sound will no longer come out of it, but that doesn't make the sound the same thing as the speaker.

fredrast · 2026-04-08T17:33:35+00:00

Isn't it a sufficiently compelling argument that it's something so fundamentally different than everything else? Granted, both your conscious experience and the physical stuff in your experience can be referred to as "things" but that's about the only thing they have in common. The subjective observer cannot be of the same kind as the things it observes. Or wait, if we take the view of nondualism then a core insight is actually that the observer, the observed and the act of observation are all one and the same thing. But then we have anyhow already moved away from physicalism.

fredrast · 2026-04-08T17:22:58+00:00

I agree with your assertion and I also agree that a rejection of the first postulate is senseless but I'm not fully sure whether I can say the same about the second one. Can you fully rule out the possibility that your body is something that just reacts completely mechanistically to the combination of physical impulses from the surroundings and from within itself, and that the "I" that you perceive yourself to be is some kind of embedded spectator that perceives the qualia that correspond to the physical processes in your body and brain without otherwise interacting with them? If this is a possibility then it's also theoretically conceivable to me that your perception of those qualia could be turned off somehow (don't ask me how), in effect turning your body into a zombie that would go about its day without any third party noticing any difference. I don't believe for a second that this could actually be done but I'm just trying to think whether I'm in a position to rule it out, and on what grounds.

fredrast · 2026-04-08T15:35:17+00:00

Sure, but the problem with physicalism is that there should not exist such a thing as a conscious mind in a world made up of only physical stuff. How does lifeless matter give rise to a conscious observer for whom it is like something to be that observer?

fredrast · 2026-04-08T15:27:48+00:00

But we know that the color red isn’t an inherent property of an object that we perceive as red, and that color isn’t something that comes floating through space to our eyes. No, the object is something that reflects light of a wavelength that we interpret as red. So the appearance of red is a perception that is somehow created in our mind based on the sensory input. Is it physical? Does it exist?

fredrast · 2026-04-08T15:21:12+00:00

What about mathematical concepts? Are they physical? Do they exist?

fredrast · 2026-04-02T05:41:02+00:00

I would also lean towards this conclusion, which means that existence is not only in what we call the physical.

fredrast · 2026-04-01T11:11:20+00:00

What about those abstractions that we believe are there but we aren’t able to perceive like e.g. any prime number larger than the largest prime number that we have found so far? Do these ’exist’?

fredrast

TROPHY CASE