Following is how I like to think about consciousness. When you talk about consciousness, you must also consider what is unconscious; because both go together. The consciousness and unconsciousness are of the mind. You cannot talk about them without relating them to the mind. The way electricity entering into an equipment brings the equipment to life; in the same way Spirit entering into the mind makes the mind conscious and when the mind detaches from the Spirit, it becomes unconscious. This life giving Spirit is all pervasive and the way every body breath from the same pool of atmospheric air, in the same way every mind (human or animal or insect) receive consciousness from the same source of all pervasive Spirit. So in this sense consciousness is not a quale but the all pervasive Spirit is a quale.

Perhaps if you look up Qualia you will find a definition, it is a philosophical term.

Wieslaw,

I think the problem with concepts is that we have to re-build the mental construction of somebody's idea in our mind. This process is not trivial. If we have not the same structure of mind (every body's mind is different) we have problems to follow the description.

This problem is quite different to the problem of qualia.

I agree that consciousness is a specific quale. This agreement is nice but for what is it good? We have to answer the question: What is a quale (plural: qualia)?

My hypothesis is that a quale is a stable activity of neuronal activity caused by feed back loops which may represent objects of our perception.

What do you think about that idea?

@Peter:

Sorry for Latin verb, but popular in philosophy:

In philosophy, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale) are individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

The only trouble with instantiating qualia as strictly neural activity is that you necessarily put a ceiling on the time scales for conscious thought/control. There are a number of cases in which performance depends on enacting a voluntary response or adjusting a voluntary response to a perturbation below the traditional timescales thought to necessary for strictly neural processing.

Consciousness can refer to a state--say the state of conscious alert wakefulness; but it can also aver to the condition perhaps best described in terms of being "conscious of" something. In this latter form one can, say be in a dream state and conscious of the dream elements, etc or one can be in an awake state and conscious of memories, or perceptions, or phantasies, etc. Qualia are present with some of the elements of which we are conscious and not others. For example, my perception of the red chair includes the quale of redness; my feeling pain includes centrally the quale of pain; but interestingly my memory of my pain 2 weeks ago does not include the quality of pain and it is hard to re-evoke it. On the other hand the quale of redness can easily be re-evoked in my memory of the red chair.

As someone whose work has been toward establishing the reality of unconscious (and a-rational) contents, I've always wondered if there can be unconscious qualia or if there is something inherently inconsistent, even incoherent it that formulation. (Perhaps that question is for another thread?)

Good morning,

if you asked me the reason is, that language (written or spoken) is simply not made to 'upload' and copy the full information into someones head. Especially when it comes to feelings and emotions or other kinds of sensations your communication partner must at least be able to reproduce this sensation in order to understand you. But what your communication partner in most cases does not need is some kind of commiseration so that both of you are in the worst cast unable to act. That would be pretty inefficient in some cases.

Same with any describtion you read: Does it consist any information about what the author felt? Was it a joy? Was it a pain? We do not have this information here. Anyway.. wouldn't make much sense if someone wrote he/she felt like this or that during his/her work.

"From this point of view, our consciousness is specific quale"

I would rather say one perceives a specific quale which leads to a certain state. And in some cases it is better when you communicate with someone it does not set you in the same state. Or do you want to feel someones pain just by listening or be suicidal afterwards? I don't think so. This restriction of not having the same quale and not being set into the same state of mind can indeed have some advantages. The bad thing is it can also come up with some disadvantages. But you know what I think: If someone has a problem to come up with a clear describtion and let's say it is not poor language skill another one might not be more competent to clearify this problem.

Linda,

you wrote "For example, my perception of the red chair includes the quale of redness; my feeling pain includes centrally the quale of pain; but interestingly my memory of my pain 2 weeks ago does not include the quality of pain and it is hard to re-evoke it. On the other hand the quale of redness can easily be re-evoked in my memory of the red chair."

Did you have realized that the quale of the colored chair characterizes a property of the chair and the quale of your pain is an alarm signal of you (r body). It makes no sense to remember pain like a color or other property because pain is not a property of you. At best you may remember some feelings in the context of your pain 

There are three ontologically (very) different classes of entities: physical entities (C1), mental entities/states (C2), and abstract entities (C3). Stones (C1), love (C2), and number 4 (C3) are different kinds of entities. They are all "real", but they belong to different classes of entities (and kinds of existence).

Strictly speaking, science (physics) speaks only about entities of C1; it does not have any taxonomy (concepts) by which it could "grasp" entities of C2 and C3. I tried to say a little more about this issue in my paper "Time and Change", available at RG.

Mario,

your attempt is very interesting but a bit short, so it may occur a little confusion about the contexts you mean with C1 to C3. 

I think physics speaks about C1 only in expressions of C3 because so called physical entities are often abstract (electron, quark, a.s.o.) or do you know what an electron 'really' is?

I appreciate Mario's attempt to taxonomize for the purpose of discussion.

The difference between C1 and C2 depends on some sort of privacy of experience. So far, ecology and developmental biology have--rather than vindicate privacy of the internal aspects of an organism--found organisms to be much more porous than private. Simply put, I don't think I have a filter or a gate that makes things outside of me (i.e., C1) into things strictly inside me (C3).

Wilfried Musterle wrote letter to Linda:

Linda,

you wrote "For example, my perception of the red chair includes the quale of redness; my feeling pain includes centrally the quale of pain; but interestingly my memory of my pain 2 weeks ago does not include the quality of pain and it is hard to re-evoke it. On the other hand the quale of redness can easily be re-evoked in my memory of the red chair."

Did you have realized that the quale of the colored chair characterizes a property of the chair and the quale of your pain is an alarm signal of you (r body). It makes no sense to remember pain like a color or other property because pain is not a property of you. At best you may remember some feelings in the context of your pain 

Wilfired,

There is no significant difference between redness quale and quale of the pain. Pain sensation characterizes the property of the source of pain in the same way like the sense of the colored chair characterizes a property of the chair. Both are difficult to remember and to describe in symbolic language. We remember the pale colors only and the wan impression of bygone pains. In similar way we sometimes have the sharp feeling of our consciousness. And sometime, we don't remember these feelings, we are not sure if we are conscious and we can't describe what consciousness really is.

Wilfried, ...

"... I think physics speaks about C1 only in expressions of C3 because so called physical entities are often abstract (electron, quark, a.s.o.) or do you know what an electron 'really' is?"

We all speak in expressions of C3, because every language is an abstract entity (a creation of the human mind), and hence it belongs to C3. ... Electron is an abstract entity as a *form* (concept), but we assume (although we cannot prove) that this concept refers to something *physical* (whatever this means). On the other hand, number five is an abstract entity for which I do not think it refers to anything physical.

In brief, the situation with the "three-world ontology" (or framework of discourse) is far from simple: it includes difficulties which nobody solved, nor do I know how to solve them. I am very busy now, but the next text I intend to write will be an attempt to make this three-world approach as clear and precise as I can. In the meantime, let me put forward a few bits from one my old text about the idea of "three worlds".

A three-world ontological framework was advocated by Karl Popper, but he attributes this idea to Gottlob Frege (Popper 1992, 105). This basic framework has difficulties with defining the *relationships* between the three worlds, but in spite of these difficulties, we hold that this basic ontological framework should be adopted. Every division of reality brings some problems, but without some division it is not possible to speak at all.

The abstract entities we speak about may seem similar to Plato's forms (ideas), but they are quite different. Our abstract entities are creations of the human mind, while Plato's forms are prior to people and gods: they are independent of everything else and the *sources* from which the ephemeral reality springs and takes its shapes. Contrary to this, we assume that abstract entities are creations of the human mind, by means of which we try to *describe* the ephemeral reality.

The three worlds should be mutually connected in some way, but it is not clear how to speak about the "links" or "causal chains" which connect them. Roger Penrose says that the three worlds are mutually "profoundly dependent", but that the connections between them are mysterious: "there is something distinctly mysterious about the way that these three worlds inter-relate with one another", says Penrose (1997, p. 139). It really is mysterious and we do currently not have a clear solution to this mystery.

So, I hold that the three-world ontology is the right (or necessary) approach, but the story is far from complete, and it may remain incomplete for a long time.

Wieslaw,

thank you for your answer but I do not agree.

The pain is a property of the conscious system self (me) and is not a separated object of the environment. If I close my eyes the quale of the red chair disappears, the quale of the pain did not. In your fantasy you can remember the red chair but not your pain, your thirst, your sadness or other impressions of your body system. It makes no sense to remember such bodily impressions because they are alarm signals to act in a special way, to eat, to drink, to sleep or to look for an injury. To remember things of the environment is on the other hand very useful. Therefore you should discriminate these two qualia.

To my mind there seems to be some confused usage of the term "quale" in some of the preceding posts. As I understand the term, it irefers to the various assembled properties or features represented  conjointly in consciousness as  we experience a currently presented phenomenon, or alternatively, the contents of what we experience when we recall that original phenomenon as perceptual imagery. Thus redness or pain may be particular components of qualia - or of a single quale - but are not  themselves qualia. This sets me thinking whether it is actually possible to recall even the property of redness (as it doesn't seem possible to recall that of pain) without recalling some phenomenon or perceptual event in which the property featured (e.g. a red chair). I suspect not, but will be most interested to read fellow-posters' opinions on that!

As regards Three-Worlds ontologies (like that of Popper, which I'm well-aquainted with), I think the three worlds can be equated with hierarchical organization of brain representations, namely: perception (World 1) > cognition/ conceptual representation (World 2) > metacognition (World 3).  Any comments on that? It would be interesting to learn of any authors who have  drawn this parallel. William T. Powers might be one - but his hierarchy (and hence ontology) comprises twelve levels (and hence, "worlds")!

Richard,

please refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

or in German: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

@Wilfried

I have to contradict all arguments you have used in your answer 9 days ago.

The red is subjective quale of the external objects. Some external objects have a light reflection frequency response which produce the red in our brain exactly in the same way like the feeling of the pain produced by specific features of other objects. If you remove the object which produce the pain, the pain will disappear sooner or later.

Yes, I remember the pain. I remember my terrible headaches and the pain after I broke my finger. When I am thinking about, I  almost "feel" them again. I can even imagine the pain when somebody is talking how one have hit his knee against the stone. We can also share tremendous sadness, compassion, happiness and other impressions of our mind, what is the base for the empathy.

I agree, that we should discriminate different subjective impressions because some of them are simple function of single senses and other are more complex functions of the mind. But their fundamental subjective nature is the some. Both can't be defined by symbolic language. But can be presented directly to our senses even by our mirror neurons.

Wieslaw,

I am not sure, that you understood my last post addressed to you. Naturally we can remember pain but it is not in the same way we do remember colors or smells and so on. I feel the remembered pain in my whole body and it is like what I feel if somebody tells me that he has hurt his finger. It is not pain in my finger and it is not like pain but it is like a shock when I am hurt but not pain like the hurt itself, it is more generally. 

Also the emotional feelings. Naturally we can feel them because we are humans and we are familiar with such emotions. The mirror neurons can help to understand such things. There is a difference to remember the feeling and to become sad if you remember of the circumstance of that emotion. This difference was meant in my post some days ago and this difference is crucial.

Wilfried,

1. Many thanks for your link to the very informative Wikipedia article - a most handy summarization of different viewpoints.

2. Regarding your observations contrasting the remembering of pain and of colours, smells etc., I think this warrants considering the reported life-likeness of pain experienced in the phantom-limb phenomenon. Here, the pain is life-like not only in its sensory and affective qualities, but is also located in a specific - missing - body part. Clearly, its life-likeness is not consequent upon exogenous activation by a noxious stimulus; the representation is entirely endogenously activated. Likewise the reported life-likeness of tactile sensattions experienced in the Rubber Hand experiment. In addition, life-like pain and other tactile sensations can be experienced in dreams (I had one such only last night!).

Nor is the experienced pain in these instances akin to that which you have described when evoked empathetically by someone else's describing of a painful experience. In such circumstances, your own experiencing would of course be founded in the activation of analogous imagery of your own, again endogenously. However, across the population, there are enormous individual differences as to the general intensity and completeness of endogenous imagery experienced, imagery for certain modalities typically being more powerful than for others. Individual differences in the vividness of recalled imagery are attributed to levels of activation of sensory cortices by modulatory projections from brainstem nuclei, rather to essential qualitative differences in the nature of cortical representation. Given that, then your personal observations here, while being, incontestably, experientally true for you yourself, cannot be presumed to be so for other individuals, whose own observations would reflect the"performance characteristics"  of their own neural mechanisms mediating imagery and the categorization of its properties that derives from it. For them, redness or mustiness might be less vividly recallable than pain - it all depends.

Much looking forward to your comments, Wilfried,

Best regards,

Richard.

Richard,

I hope you perceived my distinction I did have made. Naturally there are many individual differences in sensing and remembering but it makes sense to distinguish between sensations of my physical body and sensations of any objects in the surrounding of me.

The phantom limb sensation is not a every day problem of humans. It is a conflict in the context of remapping the cortex. Please refer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb

Wilrfied,

You didn't pay attention to the beginning of my previous answer. I didn't read your previous explanation, but I agree this distinction is crucial for our discussion, because all these qualia are the part of our consciousness. Let me repeat, that the feeling of the "red" is not attribute of the object. We remember impression of the red in the same way like all others impressions.

Possibly this is a question of individual sensitivity. I remember the physical  and mental pains and also happiness and sadness and I can evoke these impressions associated with particular events several time. They are always bright, vivid like the purple of the sunset.. And remember, that the events are also "objects" in our episodic memory.

Wieslaw,

I agree, there are many individual variances and differences in the perception of sensations. 

If you agree Wilfried, probably you will  follow my suggestion that the consciousness is also kind of quale. But, if qualia are subjective, raw sensations  coming from our senses, what is the sense, which allow as to "feel" consciousness? Do we have the 7 sense - the sense of consciousness?

Wilfried,

Thanks for your reply! With regard to your earlier observations contrasting the experiencing of recalled pain sensations and actual, nociceptively stimulated ones, I stumbled upon this paper that may interest you:

An fMRI Study Exploring the Overlap and Differences between Neural Representations of Physical and Recalled Pain

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485317/

On the matter of recalling the sensations of colours, Section 2c of the following excellent account of Embodied Cognition may also seem relevant:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/embodcog/

Indeed the theoretical assumptions of Embodied Cognition are fundamentally relevant to your question's topic, would you agree?

Richard,

thank you for posting the papers which seems to be interesting and relevant and 'yes' I agree with your opinion about Embodiment. Only this paradigm is able to overcome the Cartesian dichotomy of body and mind. Body, mind and environment are interwoven.

Wieslaw,

"... what is the sense, which allow as to "feel" consciousness? Do we have the 7 sense - the sense of consciousness?"

Your question is a hard nut but surely there is no 7th sense at all, it is the key question of consciousness: to know that we know. It seems to be a simple mechanism because I am sure that animals are also conscious about their qualia and even more. The question may be where is the minimal level to become such perceptions. The answer is open ...

In my paper  "Architecture of Consciousness. Part one: Logic and Morphology of Neural Network" (see enclosure, unfortunately, this paper is in Polish language), I have suggested there is a few specific, subjective sensations which are similar to sensational feelings. The difference is, that we have no sensory cells which correspond to these sensations. We "feel" sorrow, happiness and consciousness  in the some way  like all other qualia, but they are internal feelings, not caused by direct, external stimulation of our external senses.

I am writing about something different, then to "understand" "we are happy" or "we are conscious". There is possibly separate semblion in our brain (in categories proposed by Vadakkan) which must be stimulated in order to have such feeling. This feeling has nothing to do with the knowledge that we are aware of reality and that we have the reasons to be happy.

http://www.kul.pl/files/581/Roczniki_Filozoficzne/roczniki_filozoficzne_63_1_2015/RF2015nr1_139-171_Galus.pdf

What is a non-subjective experience?

An objective experience is surely a collection of subjective experiences that share commonality that is repeatable for others to experience?

A dream or nightmare may be considered a subjective experience, yet it is possible to use symbols to communicate at least some of the sensation and impressions of that dream to others. Indeed, could we not consider insight and creativity as a subjective experience, and the results of that insight and creativity when manifest in the physical world as the communication of those subjective impressions?

Or am I missing the point of this question?

Phil

Dear Philip,

It seems that everyone knows what is "the objective experience" and rather asks, what is a subjective experience. In my understanding, the subjective experience is associated with qualia and feelings, which these qualia cause in our mind. They can also occur under influence of memories of qualia or emotion associated with memories of earlier happy or unpleasant experiences. These feelings are very difficult to convey to other people, and if we convey them to others by poetry, facial expressions and metaphors, do not they become objective feelings.

But your question is about the objective experience. At first glance, this seems easier question, because we all have some idea of what it is an objective reality that surrounds us. However, to me, and probably to you, the key is the objective experience in terms of of our mind.

I defines the objective experience as a process of pattern recognition provided by our senses through their comparison and determination of the similarity to the patterns embedded in our memory, and bringing into association with stored complex structures representing the model of the world, which is formed gradually in the mind through learning during lifetime experience . Enabling new percepts to the model requires it, though partial similarity to at least some portion of the mental representation of the model. Such compliance new perceptions to the existing model already means "understanding". It generates satisfaction in the brain, a positive emotion that drives the process of comparison, thats thinking.

"Understanding" means, in turn, to find a relationship between the new experience and existing representations of other objects. They can be expressed in the symbolic language with abstract concepts. These relationships undergo therefore also the description and analysis in the symbolic language with the help of ordinary Aristotelian logic. Understanding the role of a new experience in the existing model of the world, recognized by us as objectively existing one, is just the "objective experience", which you asked for.

This new experience does not need and can not even refer to qualia, because they are not subjected to logical analysis and formal description in symbolic language.

Let me remind you of what is written earlier in this discussion that the physical characteristics of the external world, like the colors, smells and sounds are not qualia. Qualia are internal, first-person, subjective impressions that they evoke in our mind.

Dear Weislaw

Asking what is a non subjective experience is not the same as asking what is an objective experience; perhaps not as simple to answer as 'everyone seems to know'.

It is right to question what is understanding and I would suggest that understanding is a correlation between what we 'experience' and a 'mental process that allows us to create a subset of 'experience' that we can term 'knowing' (or in some cases 'belief'). When we can achieve this categorisation we feel secure and comfortable, a state that is desirable.

This may be why we have a desire to create mathematical models that allow us to achieve a level of understanding and so bring some comfort, although I suggest this may have undesirable side effects - but that is another topic. 

Thank you for the reminder that the physical characteristics of the external world are not qualia, to which I ask the humble question, how do we detect the external world other than through sensors that feed data to our consciousness through impressions that are subjective. It is surely that there has been consistency and reproducibility of these impressions shared by others that allows us to create a subset of subjective that we term objective? Or is there some other way our consciousness is able to detect the so called external world?

Phil 

Philip,

We can not to detect the world in a different way. But we may have a judgment about him on the basis of deductive reasoning. However, this applies to abstract models mostly and not qualia.

We can not be sure of compliance and repeatability of qualia in other people. Just as we can not be sure if they have any consciousness. We observe the reactions of other people and we see that they also are able to operate effectively in the environment. So we can assume that they have the ability to build an adequate model of the environment. As we know, the knowledge about the environment can derive only through the senses and sensory experiences generated in their brains. Thus we can suspect that they are aware and feel qualia. Decides resemblance to ourselves and our behavior. See, how difficult it is to determine whether an octopus or a visitor from outer space are aware and they have the same feeling of qualia?

You wrote: "although I suggest this may have undesirable side effects - but that is another topic."

Can you explain closer, what's the effect?

Not sure I understand the question. However, plunging in anyway, it seems to me that consciousness (primary, not reflective) is the general quale, not specific. As such it is shared by non-human animals who experience their environment without reflective awareness of their awareness

Dear Linda

It seems to me that we must distinguish between the process of becoming aware of qualia, with the realization that one is aware. It is not the same.

It seems to me that we must distinguish between the process of becoming aware of qualia, with the realization that one is aware. It is not the same.

Dear Linda,

Something different is to realize the perception of colors, smells and sounds, and another is to realize that one is aware of, or that he loses this awareness. For example, drinking alcohol or gradually take increasing doses of drugs, we not only perceive the world differently, because our senses are impaired, but also feel that we are in a different state of consciousness. And I'm not talking about the reasoned position of the type: "Oh, now I hear worse, so unless something happens to my consciousness." Definitely, animals not possessing symbolic language, will see in other way their unawareness. I mean subjective feeling, when sometimes we perceive the world and themselves in this world clearly and firmly, and sometimes we feel lost, we lose recognition focus of the environment and the issues, we are involved.

Animals, having central nervous system, have the capacity to feel qualia.

Their feeling is, however, weaker in proportion to the degree of complexity of their brains. Primitive animals feel less pain (which may not be an incentive to cruelty to animals). reliability and sense of awareness among them seems less clear. However, if we agree that consciousness is another quale, then why they may would not to feel it?

Dear Wieslaw

Your statements seem bold and I would be most interested if you could link me to the evidence that supports, in particular you wrote: 'we cannot be sure if other people have consciousness'.

Again I reference the work of D Hawkins, I have previously posted one of his papers on RG. This work certainly seems to measure consciousness, and its effects seem to be measurable by techniques developed at Princeton PEAR labs.

To expand more on my previous comment about undesirable effects

I think it is fair to say that none of us have full knowledge of this physical reality. We try to develop a mental understanding of our experience of this objective causal reality through all kinds of mechanisms, of which science is quite successful. When we come to ask such a simple question as, 'must everything have a cause?' we end up with strange conclusions, for if we answer yes, then logic dictates there can be no beginning, a logial impossibility and so borders on the edge of our ability to rationalise, yet if we answer no, then we open the door to events just happening without a cause, a kind of supernatural reality.

The problem is that our mind is perhaps not the right tool to use in trying to find answers. If we could be satisfied with knowing the answer, on condition that we may never ever be able to communicate the answer to anyone else, if our longing for the answer is genuine, then our mind is actually an obstacle, and the more we please the mind with our models and mathematics, the more challenging finding the answer will become, a detrimental side effect. On the other hand, if our purpose is to promote mental debate and engage others, then no finer subject could be chosen, for it is engaging, ad infinitum, - or perhaps ad nausium :-)

Phil

Dear Philip

You  wrote above :

"When we come to ask a simple question as, 'everything must have a cause?' in the end up with strange conclusions, for if the answer yes, then logic dictates there can be no beginning and logical impossibility and so borders on the edge of our ability to rationalize,.....

The issue Is That our mind is perhaps not the right tool to use in trying to find answers................"

This issue has already been discussed here.

What you have written boils down to the question, if our mind is able to know all the complexity of the universe, who begot it?

We do not have a ready answer.

Our observations provide us with information that can not be consistently explained in our formal, symbolic language of physics and mathematics. However, if some genius will propose an effective model, the humanity gradually adopt it as a natural and will recognize that the parameters that exist in there, they are also a reality.

See my answer for Christian on page 6 :

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_the_time_a_product_of_the_mind

Technically no, only because of the question phrasing, but actually I agree. Our consciousness (Level 4 and 3 Consciousness) is qualia (Level 2 Consciousness) and their compositions, unified in a single mind, and underlain by physical processes that are fundamental consciousness events (Level 1 Consciousness).