[amarte]

"There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve."

I don't think this is necessarily true. It seems to me like the universe would get on exactly the same without internal representation. By "internal representation" I mean a universe without "embodiment" -- no experience of being me or being you, no feelings felt, no colors seen, no sounds heard, etc.. And yet those experiences "exist" in some sense. Call them illusions or whatever, but I am and you are. So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are. That seems to be the puzzling question to me -- that nothing has to be experienced, and yet things are being experienced.

[raducu]

1) The issue of what perceptions "actually" are will be impossible to answer because qualia are ireductible.

Let me explain: you feel pain in your foot.

As a scientist I cut your foot and you no longer feel pain in your foot.

Or I cut the pain nerves, or the spinal cord, or give you pain medicine.

Or I find a brain receptor and a chemical responsible for pain.

Or in the future, we find a couple of brain networks that when hacked turn of or exacerbate this and that sensation. We find the exact neuron microstructure that is actually a quantum computer and a certain process/instruction set can precisely manipulate sensations. We find the exact process that is responsible for the "self" sensation.

I know that would still not satisfy my question of "what are sensations?".

"Yeah, this and that neural network, but WHO is actually feeling that sensation?".

It would be a little bit like trying to "see" in 4D space -- impossible actually.

2) Why are sensations really needed?

If we get to that advanced level as to technically answer the first question, even without a gut feeling understanding, I think we could actually understand the answer to this question.

The answer might be -- "because AI can happily process numbers, but the biological quantum neural nets cannot, and they need this "sensation" representation to actually work in the most efficient way possible.

By "quantum" I mean some missing stuff we don't know yet, I'm not saying the brain is a "quantum computer".

[mannykannot]

> But WHO is actually feeling that sensation?

This reminds me of a story from Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls. An early multiuser computer system did fine with a small number of users, but choked when one more was added, above a certain threshold. "No problem", said some wag "just find where that threshold is stored and increase it." The joke, of course, is that the number didn't exist as an explicitly-realized value; it emerged as a phenomenon out of how the system as a whole ran.

When you are in pain, your conscious mind - an emergent phenomenon from the physical processes of your body (primarily the brain), or so I suspect - observes itself. There is nothing mysterious in systems observing themselves; that's what a computer doing when it raises and responds to a segfault, for example.

[raducu]

I'm not saying it is incorrect, but the emergent theory of self-awareness is a bit hand-wavy.

Surely a primitive man could say an airplane flying is an emergent property of the airpland, like Aristotle said about many things?

I was just questioning the level of satisfaction we would get as science would reach the best explanation of what sensations are.

I think right now we are nowhere near that scientific knowledge.

[mannykannot]

Considerable vagueness is to be expected in any field so far from an explanation, and the situation is even worse in the dualist camp: to the best of my knowledge, they have never been able to offer one definite, affirmative claim about how the alleged non-physical aspects of the mind work. All they do is weave tendentious arguments against there ever being a physical explanation of the mind.

Emergent phenomena are pervasive in complex systems, and this stands as an effective response to naive dualist misconceptions such as that materialism requires that a quale must be identical with a single physical thing.

Even in airplanes, behavioral traits such as stability emerge from the interaction of several physical features.

[mannykannot]

> So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are.

The most plausible answer, in my opinion, is that our lack of knowledge about how our minds work means that we are free to imagine something that probably isn't so. Imagination is not a good enough guide to how things are to be the considered a basis of knowledge.

[kordlessagain]

> I don't think this is necessarily true.

Most people, say 99% or so, can form an internally perceived image of something in their mind's eye. The rest aren't seeing things in their mind's eye, other than that which is built from direct sensory input. Both are form.

  You see with your eyes
  I see destruction and demise (that's right)
  Corruption in disguise
  From this fuckin' enterprise
  Now I'm sucked into your lies
  Through Russel, not his muscles but percussion he provides
  For me as a guide
  Y'all can see me now 'cause you don't see with your eye
  You perceive with your mind
  That's the inner
  So I'ma stick around with Russ' and be a mentor
  Bust a few rhymes so motherfuckers remember where the thought is
  I brought all this
  So you can survive when law is lawless (right here)
  Feelings, sensations that you thought was dead
  No squealing, remember that it's all in your head

[bawolff]

That's a bit of a jump from no internal representation to no embodiment (whatever embodiment means in this context as that is pretty unclear to me)

[amarte]

I take internal representation to be an aspect of "embodiment", which you could also call the experience of being in the first person. If some idea is being represented internally, then it is being experienced, and the sum total of all these different experiences happening together (seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling etc..) are what you could call "embodiment".

I think philosophy is a difficult subject partially because people use different terms, or sometimes their own unique terms, to describe subtle and complex ideas.

When I mentioned embodiment, I was referring to the experience of being in the first person while feeling hot or cold, seeing colors and objects, hearing the sound your keyboard makes when you press keys, feeling the keys with the tips of your fingers, etc. All of that together at once.