"So where is the experience and what is its relationship to the brain?" Experience is always 'here' and 'now'. Human experience is a very complex and richly elaborated kind of experience which, when observed in all of the terms of the pre-human levels of zoology, biology, chemistry, and physics is represented as the activity of the nervous system. At that level, 'we' do not exist. Think of objects-in-space as a flat horizontal plane which intersects a perpendicular vertical plane of experiences or subjects-through-time. In order to represent experience as an object, all of the qualitative depth must be flattened, like the whole history of botany and future of all apple tree orchards is condensed as an apple seed object. It's all part of one continuum, but experience is to the brain what a story is to a book. One does not cause the other, they are just embodying opposite ends of the universal continuum of presentation.

Craig writes in post#15: "I would never say that there are no images in our experience, only that experience is not in the brain. There aren't any images in the brain or in the world, only in our experience. There isn't any comedy in the TV set, or in the brain of the TV viewer, only in the experience of the viewer watching TV. " So where is the experience and what is its relationship to the brain?

Ah, Thanks James, That was what I was mainly asking for here, help in formalizing this stuff, so thanks a bunch for all this. It is helping, but I feel I have a long way to go before I'm good at it. So let me see if I can describe what I think of as the quale interpretation problem, in our perception process, in this formalized way? Perception process: # s_t glutamate reflecting light. # s_{t+1} light transducing to neural signals via retina. # s_{t+n} multiple neural processing steps to build our knowledge. # s_{f-1} Last abstracted building knowledge step before final knowledge. # s_f final conscious experience of knowledge of glutamate redness. s_f = final_function(s_{f-1}) But of course, since glutamate reflects "white" light, our brain simply represents it, in this final state, with something that is very different than glutamate. In other words, the final_function is where the problem is, as it determines what to use to represent it's referent, which is very different. Are there any hidden variables, or anything odd, in all that? Also, we're saying it must have additional causes, or it must be epiphenomenal, but isn't there another possibility, in that it could be more fundamental? If we take some other fundamental natural phenomenon, like say voltage generated across a wire, when it is moved through a magnetic field. Maybe this magnetite field has some hidden quality, which is what is causing, the voltage. Since it is 'hidden' we just think there is no reason for the voltage. Kind of a bad example, but isn't something like this a possibility? Couldn't the reason glutamate behaves as it does, be because of its phenomenal qualities, if we could only observe such? But I still think it's best to just think of phenomenal qualities as simply a different way to perceive a certain state of something, which has a specific set of causal properties. Brent Allsop P.S. It looks like we are very close to having a new RQT statement everyone can agree with, yay! Thanks, Mike for keeping us moving on this!!

Canonizer enforces its own protocol for edits. Unfortunately, it was too cumbersome for all of the changes necessary to separate dualism into child camp of RQT. We made that Google Doc so we could all just edit freely (ala Wikipedia). If some change goes back and forth a few times, then we should stop and discuss it, but we'll never get anything done unless we just start doing it. So there is deliberately no protocol beyond reasonable courtesy. I think the risk of vandalism should be pretty low in a group like this, and it wouldn't matter much anyway since it is not yet ready to be ported to Canonizer. So, I'll eventually get to it, if no one else does it first.

@Brent: "As he should, James keeps taunting me and pointing out the fact that I haven't yet adequately provided a falsifying example of what he claims he can 'prove'. (Even though in my mind, I've successfully attempted such, many times, already.)" If you think that you have come anywhere close, then you have no idea what I am looking for. Before the rest of you get too far down the wrong path, let me explain. The universe consists of states of matter, s. Let the state of matter at time t be, s_t. The universe has a transition function f. Right? With me so far? Ok, the transition function, f, is either deterministic (if you believe in the MWI of QM), or else it is completely random with absolutely no pattern or intentionality (if you believe in the copenhagen interpretation of QM). Thus, in the deterministic case: So s_{t+1})=f(s_t); and in the non-deterministic case: So p(s_{t+1})=f(s_t). Ok, still with me? NOW, let's posit something "else", anything "else". We will call it e, for "else" and "experience". Now, write down the function for the state transitions such that the else affects the state transitions, but can't be written as part of the state. What you immediately notice is that there is no way to do this. It can't be done. If you try (and I have tried), you end up creating a system that can always be re-written with a "super" state, that contains the old state and e, with a new transition function. If you try and write it as a Bayesian network, you can try and write e in a manner similar to that of a hidden markov model, with e "hidden" from outside observers, but visible from the first person perspective only. But if you do that, then you have created something that is observable ONLY from the first person perspective, but that affects (and is affected by) the third person perspective. The problem here, is that we are pretty darn sure that the third person perspective is enought to account for all the causal behavior. Which means that we can observe all the objective state necessary to constrain the probability of the next state of the system. So if there is anything "more" going on here, that "more" doesn't constrain the next state of the system... that makes it epiphenomenal. I really don't understand why this rather obvious observation is so hard for people to grasp. For example, Brent writes: "But, doing so would only miss the important theoretical possibility I think is critically important - that there are more than such discrete computational units possible in known physical reality...My argument is that there is some system in the brain that can accomplish this achievement, that must be more than such simple discrete units of computation." But this misses the point that these "discrete computational units" ARE sufficient to characterize the behavior of the system, and even to characterize and track the third person objective states of the matter making up the system! So what does that mean? It means, yet again, that if there actually is anything "more" than these computational units, then they don't affect the third person objective reality in any way, and thus are epiphenominal!!!!! I don't know why that remarkably obvious observation is so hard to understand, and I must admit to a certain bit of frustration in my attempts. "But, the prediction is that when we discover the phenomenal qualities of the same, this will provide additional insight into why the particular causal behaviors behave the way they do, in a way that appears to cause the glutamate to cause us to select the strawberry." In other words, Brent is proposing that e affects s through t... something like s_{t+1}=f(e_t,s_t) and e_{t+1}=f(e_t,s_t). Further, he is suggesting that, to date, we have been ignoring e, and mistakenly proposing s_{t+1}=f(s_t)... and that once we add this extra ingredient, we will suddenly realize how much simpler the equation with the 'e' in it is, and we will better understand WHY things have the causal properties that they do. I WISH Brent would be formal about this, so I wouldn't have to guess what he is thinking from his ambiguous text, but this is at least what I THINK he is saying. In any event, this is essentually proposing that e is a hidden node in a network, at least hidden from the third person perspective. But this makes predictions about how the states of matter should behave. Information (that effects the next state) has to be pushed into e, and then flow out of e to affect the next s. If this were not the case, we could leave it out, and ignore it when computing the state transitions (meaning it would be epiphenomenal). To see why this flow of information is needed, just consider that the objective effects of the perception process needs to inform our experience of the strawberry (so information MUST flow INTO e form the previous states). Then note that for the experience to affect the future objective state (to avoid epiphenomenalism), this information must now be allowed to flow OUT of e, and back into s. There are two ways that this could happen... 1. in a straightforward deterministic way (where no "processing" happens hidden back in e), and 2 in a more complex way. In the case of 1, we see that we can always simplify the equation by taking e out, and we get the same objective result. Therefore there is no reason to believe in e, not even our "feelings" of qualia, since we can account for all the motion of the atoms in our brains without it, and thus account for our claims, beliefs, and memories of qualia without it. If taking e out does impact the objective state, such that you can't predict the next state accurately without taking it into account, then we actually have case 2. In case 2, we find that this theory has a very powerful objective prediction which is not met in our observations. We should SEE information appear to "vanish" form the objective third person reality, only to then impact future objective states in strange ways. Yet this prediction has not been observed in reality. That's not how matter and energy behaves. Instead, the third person state is enough to predict the probability of the future state, and Bells equation even tells us that there is no extra hidden state that accounts for the randomness of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM. So, it would seem that Brent's theory (if I understand it correctly) has already been falsified. If I don't understand it correctly, then by all means, explain it formally in stead of handwavey so that I can understand it better.

"If a picture in the head required a homunculus to view it, then the same argument would hold for any other form of information in the brain" Right. It does hold for all forms of perception. That's why I say that 'information' isn't in the brain. Molecules and cells are in the brain. The brain and the information aren't 'in' anything except our life. Damage to the brain changes our ability to be informed about ourselves and the world, but the computations of the brain merely organize our perceptions and experiences, not generate them. Experience cannot absent - it is the ground of being. "But this argument is invalid. For in fact there is no need for an internal observer of the scene, since the internal representation is simply a data structure like any other data in a computer, except that this data is expressed in spatial form. " No, that argument is invalid. There is no data structure in a computer, there are only physical microelectronic switching sensors. The computer doesn't need to represent it's data *in any way whatsoever* to itself. The computations are literal events happening to the substances being electronically stimulated, it has no need to project a magical 'vision-like-experience-of-space' into it's functions. Even if it did, why pick vision? Space can be represented as a tactile experience, acoustic, vestibular, even olfactory. There is no conceivable purpose for, or mechanism of sense which would not be 100% redundant with blind, unconscious information transfer. Just unplug your monitor and see if your computer gets lost without it. Pull out the video card. Does it mind? Does it need a seeing eye dog now?

> "This is undeniable PROOF that images can exist in our experience independent of objects in the external world." Of course we can have visual experiences that correspond to conditions inside of our body rather than outside of our body. We are experiencing the fatigue of our optical system in that area (retinal cells? bipolar cells? ganglia? all of the above?) in the native way that we do - as a visual feeling. This doesn't mean that the visual feelings we have of the 'external world' are not the genuine presentation of our view of the world, and the world's only visually meaningful presentation in our experience. > "When you begin to redefine the meaning of "images" from the normal definition that everyone understands, to a new definition which denies images in cameras and computers (because there are no 'eyes' to see them) is a sure sign of dogmatic paradoxy" When you begin to accuse anyone who suggests a new understanding and expresses it with a correspondingly reconsidered definitions of familiar terms of dogmatic paradoxy, then you prejudice the possibility of new discovery by limiting it to definition in inadequate terms. Image is fine for casual use, but when we are really trying to get to the heart of what image is, what good is it to say that we already know? > "a fundamental paradoxical flaw in your understanding which must be covered over by re-defining terms until black is white, and up is down, and there are no images in my experience even when I am having a dream or hallucination." I would never say that there are no images in our experience, only that experience is not in the brain. There aren't any images in the brain or in the world, only in our experience. There isn't any comedy in the TV set, or in the brain of the TV viewer, only in the experience of the viewer watching TV. > "and the visual cortex as an internal representation at the end of the causal chain." That may not even be factually correct: http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/9/1/4.full#sec-2 "Afferent Activation of Neurons in V1 May Not Generate a Visual Experience" http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=consciousness-does-not-reside-here "They achieved the latter two conditions by asking them to monitor a series of single letters that appeared on the ring and to report the presence of a particular letter. On the other half of the trials, subjects were told to ignore these letters. In total, four conditions were tested. Note that the layout on the monitor always contains the same elements with the ring being projected into the same eye as the moving grating or the opposite eye, et cetera. The key difference was in the minds of the volunteers whose brains were scanned—whether or not they consciously saw the grating (which they had to report) and whether or not they attended to it. The cognitive neuroscientists measured the brain's functional MRI response in the primary visual cortex (or V1) in the brain's posterior"... ..."Paying attention to the target consistently and strongly increased the fMRI activity, regardless of whether the subject saw the target or not." Visual cortex activity may be nothing but how we function in a visual world, and *not at all* a simulation generating machine. Even if it were though... simulating to whom? Where? You would ALWAYS need another homunculus layer to read it. Sooner or later something has to detect and make sense of something. We know that the end result looks like both the world, images of the world, and a world of images - all seamlessly present simulataneously in our daily experience, but no hint of any conversion on any level of physiological description. Physiology is the wrong place to look. We should be looking at time, not place. "If you deny even that most basic fact of neurophysiological reality, I don't though. My view of your view is that it confuses conventional assumptions about how neurophysiology should be interpreted with reality. I question that the correspondence, not the reality. "I'm not about to debate it with you, your mind is already made up, and the error of your thinking is revealed by the paradoxes embedded in it, where images are not images and representations do not represent." Your defensiveness reinforces my sense that your argument, though well informed lacks curiousity and courage. Images cannot be representations without presentations. Presentations cannot exist unless they are being presented in some sense format. It's a case of overthinking perception and then denying the infinite regress that it entails. Again - sooner or later something has to make sense of something. Miniaturizing it until we are so impressed with our understanding of microphysiology changes absolutely nothing. There is still no point of representing the world to something that can already see the world, and there is no point in seeing an image of a world that can't really be seen. The only answer that I see is that experience and physics are two aspects of the same phenomenon. I see no flaw possible in it other than it is unfamiliar to us and we are stuck on explaining the universe from the view of a hypothetical objective voyeur.

Continuing to Mike Gashler: Oh yeah, and here it is in the Cartoon Epistemology: http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist42.html But who is the viewer of this internal theatre of the mind? For whose benefit is this internal performance produced? Is it the little man at the center who sees this scene? But then how does HE see? Is there yet another smaller man inside that little man's head, and so on to an infinite regress of observers within observers? http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist43.html No of course not! It only goes in one level! Take a look! What do you see inside your phenomenal head? I see nothing! It is an empty void! There is no infinite series of heads within heads, there is just a fuzzy brown emptiness with nothing inside, that opens to the world through the eyes like two open windows.

Reply to Mike Gashler: >>> Also, we should directly address the homunculus argument in the RQT statement, since it is the most common objection to representationalism. Steve, you wrote a book about that, right? Would you add a paragraph or two? <<< I'm not familiar with the protocol for editing the camp statement -- I see some changes pending in yellow hightlight? Can I direct you to my refutations of the homunculus argument? I have several versions. Here under The Epistemology of Conscious Experience http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/epist/epist4a.html This "picture-in-the-head" or "Cartesian theatre" concept of visual representation has been criticized on the grounds that there would have to be a miniature observer to view this miniature internal scene, resulting in an infinite regress of observers within observers. But this argument is invalid. For in fact there is no need for an internal observer of the scene, since the internal representation is simply a data structure like any other data in a computer, except that this data is expressed in spatial form. For if a picture in the head required a homunculus to view it, then the same argument would hold for any other form of information in the brain, which would also require a homunculus to read or interpret that information. In fact any information encoded in the brain needs only to be available to other internal processes rather than to a miniature copy of the whole brain. The fact that the brain does go to the trouble of constructing a full spatial analog of the external environment merely suggests that it has ways to make use of this spatial data. In other words, the brain employes an analogical paradigm of perceptual computation to make use of the analogical data in spatial perception. Here in Chapter 1 of my book http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/book/chap1.html (under heading An Analogical Paradigm of Representation) This raises the question of why the brain goes to the trouble of constructing an internal replica of the external world, and why that replica has to be presented as a vivid spatial structure instead of some kind of abstract symbolic code. It also raises the philosophical question of who is viewing that internal replica of the external world. For if the presence of an internal model of the world required a little man, or "homunculus" in your brain to observe it, that little man would itself have to have an even smaller man in its little head, resulting in an infinite regress of observers within observers. But the internal model of the external world is not constructed so as to be viewed by an internal observer, but rather, the internal model is a data structure in the brain, just like any data in a computer, with the sole exception that this data is expressed in explicit spatial form. If a picture in the head required a homunculus to view it, then the same argument would hold for any other form of information in the brain, which would also require a homunculus to read or interpret that information. In fact any internal representation need only be available to other internal processes rather than to a miniature copy of the whole brain. The reason why the brain expresses perceptual experience in explicit spatial form must be because the brain possesses spatial computational algorithms capable of processing that spatial information. In fact the nature of those spatial algorithms is itself open to phenomenological examination, as I will show shortly. On p. 38 of the same book I cite Steven Pinker making the same argument Pinker (1984, p. 38) pointed out, however, that there is no need for an internal observer of the scene, because the internal representation is merely a data structure like any other data in a computer, except that these data are expressed in spatial form. In fact any information in the brain needs only to be available to other internal processes, rather than to a miniature copy of the whole brain. To deny the spatial nature of the perceptual representation in the brain is to deny the spatial nature so clearly evident in the world we perceive around us. In my Gestalt Isomorphism paper: http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/bubw3/bubw3.html 6.1 The Cartesian Theatre and the Homunculus Problem This "picture-in-the-head" or "Cartesian theatre" concept of visual representation has been criticized on the grounds that there would have to be a miniature observer to view this miniature internal scene, resulting in an infinite regress of observers within observers (Dennett 1991, 1992, O'Regan 1992, Pessoa et al. 1998). In fact there is no need for an internal observer of the scene, since the internal representation is simply a data structure like any other data in a computer, except that this data is expressed in spatial form (Earle 1998, Singh & Hoffman 1998, Lehar 2003). For if a picture in the head required a homunculus to view it, then the same argument would hold for any other form of information in the brain, which would also require a homunculus to read or interpret that information. In fact any information encoded in the brain needs only to be available to other internal processes rather than to a miniature copy of the whole brain. The fact that the brain does go to the trouble of constructing a full spatial analog of the external environment merely suggests that it has ways to make use of this spatial data. For example field theories of navigation have been proposed (Koffka 1935 pp 42-46, Gibson & Crooks, 1938) in which perceived objects in the perceived environment exert spatial field-like forces of attraction and repulsion, drawing the body towards attractive percepts, and repelling it from aversive percepts, as a spatial computation taking place in a spatial medium. If the idea of an explicit spatial representation in the brain seems to "fly in the face of what we know about the neural substrates of space perception" (Pessoa et al. 1998 author's response R3.2 p. 789), it is our theories of spatial representation that are in urgent need of revision. For to deny the spatial nature of the perceptual representation in the brain is to deny the spatial nature so clearly evident in the world we perceive around us. To paraphrase Descartes, it is not only the existence of myself that is verified by the fact that I think, but when I experience the vivid spatial presence of objects in the phenomenal world, those objects are certain to exist, at least in the form of a subjective experience, with properties as I experience them to have, i.e. location, spatial extension, color, and shape. I think them, therefore they exist (Price 1932, p. 3). All that remains uncertain is whether those percepts exist also as objective external objects as well as internal perceptual ones, and whether their perceived properties correspond to objective properties. But their existence and fully spatial nature in my internal perceptual world is beyond question if I experience them so, even if only as a hallucination. That tired old argument keeps coming back like a bad penny, even though its been refuted again and again. Because even people who hear the refutation refuse to acknowledge it as a counter-argument, because no mere logical argument is sufficient to shake them free of their comfortable naive realism!

Reply to Multisense Realism: Observe the after-image seen after viewing a bright light or camera flash. Does the after-image have color? Does it have spatial extent? Where is it located? On your retina, or does it float in space before your eyes as perceived directly where it lies? The after-image is clearly an image, it has spatial extent and even color. We know it to originate from our retina, yet we see it floating in space. This is undeniable PROOF that images can exist in our experience independent of objects in the external world. When you begin to redefine the meaning of "images" from the normal definition that everyone understands, to a new definition which denies images in cameras and computers (because there are no 'eyes' to see them) is a sure sign of dogmatic paradoxy, a fundamental paradoxical flaw in your understanding which must be covered over by re-defining terms until black is white, and up is down, and there are no images in my experience even when I am having a dream or hallucination. I've been around this merry-go-round a time or two already. This is like debating evolution with someone who believes in Creationism. You have already made up your mind, you can have your theory all to yourself. But you won't convince me by redefining ordinary terms just in order to deny the undeniable, vision is a representationalist set-up with the eye as a camera, the optic nerve as a data pipeline, and the visual cortex as an internal representation at the end of the causal chain. If you deny even that most basic fact of neurophysiological reality, I'm not about to debate it with you, your mind is already made up, and the error of your thinking is revealed by the paradoxes embedded in it, where images are not images and representations do not represent. Been there, done that, waste of time!