Phantom itch syndrome, same as phantom pain. Itch is all in your head and you can't scratch your brain, sorry!

Does physicalism owe us an answer to @neddo.bsky.social's questions about why only certain brain processes and not others entail phenomenal consciousness, and why just these phenomenal qualities? If so, physicalism may not have triumphed until it comes up with the answers.

Sign me up if I'm not already, thanks! Not sure where to find said list...

Our Darkest Hour The civilization we destroy may be our own

This is it folks. A general strike is in order if this goes through.

substack.com/home/post/p-...

Yes, any system tasked with survival has to have representational primitives on pain of a metabolically unsustainable epistemic regress. Our 3 cone visual set-up sufficed to do the job, making red one of our primitives; butterflies will have a different set given their ultraviolet sensitivity.

Dreams (esp lucid dreams), afterimages, and hallucinations are good evidence that colours are experiential contents, not properties of objects or wavelengths. Colours might *seem* to be such properties, but we've discovered otherwise, no?

Subjectively white isn't a combination of colors, but has its own unique non-composite phenomenal character. Could be that phenomenal primitives are entailed by a representational system's need to avoid a behaviorally paralyzing epistemic regress. You can't (and don't want to) second guess red!

For red to appear intrinsic, it's that its character is not owed to any combination of other colors, unlike say pink or orange which have red as a component. It's phenomenally atomic, not composite. Same for sweetness and other basic qualities. Make sense?

Yeah, basic phenomenal qualities *appear* intrinsic since they are the contents of behavior-guiding representational primitives that block what would otherwise be a paralyzing epistemic regress. And there's no evidence that qualities are mind-independent phenomena. substack.com/@twc3/p-1851...

Sensory-motor interactions are one thing, phenomenal consciousness another. Even if PC involves more than the brain (an empirical question), we can't transcend it as a representational interface. You can't step outside, observe, or witness your experience, can you?

Have you had a lucid dream? That's what woke me up to the fact that as conscious subjects we're in an untranscendable brain-based "ego tunnel". No sensory-motor contact with the world is needed to have vivid phenomenal experience. You realize that when lucid dreaming. naturalism.org/philosophy/c...

@metzinger.bsky.social in Being No One (52) makes Anil's point when he says we're "dreaming vigorously at the world": that waking experience, like a dream, is entirely brain-based phenomenal content but (unlike a dream) is constrained by sensory input, thus tracks the world, thus not hallucinatory.

Nice conversation, thanks. Re naturalizing consciousness, as naturalists we of course agree it's a natural phenomenon and the evidence in hand suggests it's connected with being in a representational relation to the world in which we're embedded, the qualitative content of the brain's world model.

Intro: "...only when we understand how the internal subjective aspects of our experiences impact our actual behaviour will we understand why consciousness evolved, and why it exists in some species but not others."

Q: How can subjective experience impact behavior if it's not identical to the NCC?

The causal role of sensory qualities like pain is already carried out by their neuromuscular correlates. If identical to correlates, they don't add causal power, if not, there's no story about how they add it. Evolution selected functions, not qualities. See sect 7 of naturalism.org/sites/natura...

Still need to explain how indeterminism, which may well exist in nature, adds to agency. As you point out in another paper with Potter, causal slack has to be *minimized* to allow for effective action and origination, thus for responsibility. naturalism.org/philosophy/f...

AI and Authorship Be transparent about your use of AI

Here's a stab at a policy for acknowledging collaboration with AI: substack.com/home/post/p-...

Both determinists, you highlight the causal story while Dan downplays it, indavertently abetting retributive inclinations based on the idea of the libertarian agent. But you both endorse criminal justice reform, you radically, Dan conservatively. naturalism.org/resources/bo...

Universal determinism may not hold, but even if indeterminism played a role in the evolution of agents like us, it doesn't afford us control over or responsibility for our actions. Determinism is no threat to effective agency, but rather a necessary condition. naturalism.org/philosophy/f...

In a separate pre-print to which I've responded they say that indeterminism and an open future are necessary for moral responsibility, but also that indeterministic noise must be constrained to be effect agents - go figure! www.naturalism.org/philosophy/f...

We don't rationally want indeterminism in how we percieve, decide and act, on pain of losing control. @wiringthebrain.bsky.social and Henry Potter say, correctly, that indeterminism must be minimized for effective agency. So why their worry about determinism? www.naturalism.org/philosophy/f...

Indeed, and any indeterminism in how the agent decides or acts (and there might be some) makes the act less their doing, not more. We rationally want to be determiners of our actions, not be free in any contra-causal sense as Potter and Mitchell suppose. Agency is compatible with determinism.

You're not going to find the terms in which the world is represented, e.g., colors, in the system that does the representing, e.g., the brain. The meaning (propositional content) of this sentence is real but only the letter forms are visible.

Yes, although the title is still in German. The link should take you to the English version.

Dynamic for sure, but there isn't an infinite range of sensations and we distinguish them in terms of their recognizable phenomenal characters, which of course often get combined in complex gestalts. Words necessarily can't do justice to basic qualities is my point.

I think so otherwise you end up in an unsustainable indefinite regress of description. But if you can discriminate indefinitely more power to you!

Do these sensations have their own phenomenal character? If so, how would you describe them? If not, then cinnamon's character can't be described in terms of them.

Well subjectlively cinnamon, say, presents as having a unique character that can't be decomposed into further components, and if it could those would be the ineffable qualitative ground floor. Descriptions have to bottom out somewhere.

That's quite the chart of possible flavor/aroma components of sake! But there's of course a limit on a palate's descriptive prowess since there have to be sensory non-decomposables.There have to be ineffables on pain of an infinite descriptive regress.

Bewusstseinskultur: Towards a culture of consciousness: Spirituality, intellectual honesty, and the planetary crisis—how to protect your self-respect and fail gracefully

A new book by @metzinger.bsky.social lays out an epistemically responsible and spiritually deep response to the looming climate crisis, one that pulls no punches in its critique of religion and capitalism. It's the unflinching, honest appraisal we need right now. www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B0FZ...