amberviper As if I haven't heard this before...
How exactly does one go about investigating the consciousness of a client? It’s a bit of a philosophical minefield, isn't it? And if we turn that lens inward to examine our own awareness—assuming we even attempt such a thing—we run straight into a fundamental wall. No matter how much we try to apply rigorous, scientific, or "objective" frameworks to the process, we are ultimately trapped within the confines of our own perspective. At the end of the day, you're performing a subjective investigation; you can dress it up in all the empirical clothing you want, but it remains an inherently private, internal affair.
If you really want to get a handle on bird intelligence—I’m talking about the heavy hitters like parrots, magpies, or crows—you have to look at how they navigate the unexpected. You can't just test what they already know; you have to throw them into a completely foreign situation and see if they can figure out the puzzle on the fly. Take the crows living out in New Caledonia, for instance; watching how they tackle novel problems is essentially the gold standard for measuring true cognitive grit.
Imagine crafting a makeshift little gadget out of nothing more than some twigs or perhaps an agave leaf—something you could actually use to fish larvae right out of their tiny hideouts deep within a tree trunk. In a controlled lab setting, researchers usually hand these creatures tools like a simple piece of wire to see how they handle it. I once watched this one crow, quite frankly, which was fascinating; the bird just looked at a straight piece of wire, figured things out, and bent it into a perfect little hook just to snag a small container filled with meat. It’s wild when you think about it. Chimpanzees, despite everything people say about them, don't seem to have that same kind of rapid-fire adaptability when the situation shifts; they actually lag behind these birds when it comes to that kind of quick-thinking problem-solving.
You’ve hit the nail on the head regarding the nature of first-person subjective inquiry, but that actually leads right back to my central argument. We tend to treat these internal experiences as if they carry some inherent weight of truth, yet a subjective impression isn't nearly as reliable as we like to pretend; at the end of the day, it is merely an impression, not a hard fact.
Trying to draw a direct line between the cognitive abilities of a chimpanzee and a crow is, frankly, a bit of a fool's errand; you’re essentially attempting to compare two entirely different evolutionary trajectories that have carved out vastly different toolkits to survive their own specific corners of the world. It’s like trying to argue whether a high-performance jet engine is "better" than a precision Swiss watch—they both represent incredible feats of engineering, sure, but they were built to solve completely different sets of problems in entirely different environments. One is optimized for raw power and atmospheric dominance, while the other is tuned for microscopic accuracy, and neither can claim superiority simply because their mechanisms don't overlap. Similarly, these two species have undergone such distinct adaptive processes to master their respective niches that any attempt at a head-to-head comparison ignores the fundamental reality of how evolution actually works.
"Quote:"
| One doesn't really head toward Qualia just to convince ourselves that what we’re seeing is actually there—that feels like a bit of a redundant exercise, doesn't it? It’s more about chasing that specific, unmistakable sensation that hitches a ride on the perception itself. I mean, why is the raw feeling of perceiving red exactly what it is, rather than some other flavor of sensation? Or even deeper, why do we possess that internal feeling at all? |
If things were even slightly different, we wouldn't be looking at red at all; it would have morphed into something else entirely. 🤷
It seems to me that our intellect is essentially an engine for generating concepts, a process that can only truly take place within the theater of a conscious state. Even when we drift off into sleep, where reality becomes a blur of dreamscapes, we are still capable of constructing those conceptual frameworks—but then again, dreaming itself is just another peculiar manifestation of consciousness, isn't it?
When you really sit down and peel back the layers of unconscious states, you start to realize that true creation simply isn't happening there; after all, if we define creation as an inherently "generative" act, then it must, by its very nature, be a conscious process.
No, I think you've got it all wrong. I don't actually sit around constructing concepts while in some heightened state of conscious deliberation. It isn't like I’m sitting at a desk, meticulously drafting definitions like a lawyer working on a contract. In fact, it's quite the opposite—I find myself tossing around various terms almost entirely by accident, using them through sheer habit without ever consciously assigning them a fixed, rigid meaning. Concepts aren't these solitary architectural projects we build in our heads through deliberate planning; rather, they gain their substance and weight out in the real world, forged through the messy, constant friction of human interaction.
It seems to me that Dennett simply refuses to acknowledge Qualia, largely because he can't wrap his head around the idea that they might actually be resolvable through science—or, more specifically, through standard physicalism.
No, I simply cannot get behind the whole notion of Qualia, primarily because the very premise feels fundamentally absurd. To attempt to discuss phenomena that lack any discernible cause—things about which we can neither say anything definitive nor uncover any truth—is, quite frankly, no different from debating the properties of things that don't even exist. It’s an exercise in futility. You have this proposition where you claim to perceive something that isn't material, yet somehow, this non-material entity manages to trigger physical reactions in people. It suggests something is causing the movement of matter without being part of the material world itself, which is just nonsense. Even if you look at what neurologists observe, they won't find any such thing; there are no "immaterial forces" operating within the brain. It’s a logical dead end, and honestly, I think Dennett is right on this one—we really ought to stop pretending Qualia exists.
Well, I think we’ve stumbled into yet another flawed analogy here. Even if we were to concede the existence of "unicorns," that wouldn't make them synonymous with Qualia. See, unicorns are just matters of pure fantasy and abstract thought, whereas with Qualia, the whole point hinges on the actual subjective experience inherent in the process itself. Does that make sense?
Actually, I'd argue that this subjective feeling sits on the exact same level as unicorns, simply because it is, itself, a subjective feeling. We can just as easily claim that such a thing—much like those mythical creatures—doesn't exist at all.
Best,
