Right. And I'm saying that's the problem.


PairTheBoard

Yes, sorry, I had doubts about the word when using it, and should have stuck to Nagel's description:

Might it not be better to hire a professional chocolate taster?

The Milky Bars are on me.

Hypogeusia and Ageusia.

I'm not sure I actually get what the problem is. To clarify, I'd also not really get what the problem was if people thought of the universe as being kind of like a lemon meringue pie. It doesn't seem like it matters, so long as they are building and using things in such a way as they work.

Re: your chocolate tasting experiment, I still wouldn't know what chocolate tasted like to you. I would, as is usual done, assume that your experience is similar as mine, but that isn't quite the same as being able to experience your experiences. Some people* find that to be interesting.

*philosophers and cannabis users and adolescents and Charlies and Brians.

Forget them. Those threads kept me up at night. I think my favourite was when I think i had Masque question for the first time if the moon was spherical, rocky and the same colour it is if there were no humans to see it. Not because of that, but that is all I can remember now. It was a good at the time.

If the universe was like lemon meringue pie I'm pretty sure there'd be people complaining that it didn't taste like chocolate.


PairTheBoard

"Playing the game well finally damn it!"

This is what consciousnesses is!

Yes exactly that and that only.

Its very basic and simple and screw the philosophers by the way that seem so lost. Bring it i say. I will give you the answer before i die. To be raised with enough love from environment (to allow some rich chemistry) to register connections this is what it is to be conscious. Then all firing up as things happen collecting info from senses creates the here and now experience. A dance of rapid connections all securing reality from endless directions of confirmation celebrated as yes it makes sense doesnt it? We live in permanent state of things making sense 99% of the time. Intelligence is knowing what comes next. We get good at it and you are now experiencing the dance of confirmations that offers satisfaction and coherence in what you call thinking. Thinking is a rapid sequence of what comes next possibilities. We are witnessing the brain observing the world and producing connection confirmations that offer further insight into what is happening or will happen next.

Yeah like hell the baby has any of this. Sure feeling a little pain and discomfort here and there without even knowing what this is. But learning fast that crying helps get better. Win number one for ignorance. And the road opens.

And yes 4 years later another story isnt it. And then another 20 later an even bigger one.


Lets finally f*cking create a computer that learns from environment and starts registering data while having degrees of freedom to modify position and environment with interactions and trial and error events daily. Yeah lets even create teaching and training environments for it. Like what a human being hasnt had like a million teachers in his life to age 30? What do you expect will happen with such dedication? See how quickly your consciousness is born to the amazement of idiots everywhere that expect the unbelievable mysticism that transmits its magic from beyond the natural. Dream on. Chemistry and not even serious QM is what is needed.

Its all emergent. Critical brain mass does it. Do you think a bat has self understanding of the world that involves elaborate planning or a very basic one based on simpler chemistry? Probably more intriguing than an ant though. Does a dog get better at it? You better believe it. A dog gets it differently and connects further. An elephant that recognizes self in mirror gets it even better.

But do you think an ant gets it? WTF can an ant get really? What you see in an ant is 100-1000 if then else statements programmed chemically to determine behavior that proves enough to do a great deal of things well. But it doesnt understand what is it doing really. It lacks the ability to observe itself and others in enough detail. Its a little primitive AI robot really.

Is a fruit fly such a remarkable brain? Oh yeah its good at avoiding capture up to a point but stupid enough to not be able to find the way out of a chemical jungle that saturates its system and cannot liberate and find the exit. Yes it gets in the bag with the vinegar through the holes but cannot get out now.

A mouse is idiotic enough to jump first and ask questions later.

We are better than all this. But ultimately we are the same thing they are only better at playing the game because with enough brain systems eventually the miracle of a breakthrough happens. So no mysticism in them and yes in our case? BS. Just more neurons with better usage and connections. The world starts feeling so much more interesting with very many things making sense. Yeah that is what a billion if then else statements does for you. Or even 1000 very key ones nested with another 1000 ones.

How many rules do we have in this game? Probably a million ones is not even needed.


A cell will look under a microscope as a very intelligent system with a plan. Doesn't? Attacking enemies? Dividing? Sure. Chemistry and complexity does that. The cell is ignorant of anything going on but its chemical processes while also ignorant remain very clear in how to produce what comes next. Natural law leads the way. Action and consequences and successful actions win and become behavior and functionality.

How do we get to the miracle from the cell to the brain with billions of them? Complexity ladder no super physical bs needed.

Time, the persistent gift of time and not merely putting things together (unless you could really put all the chemical details in place at once how could be so easy maybe some day?) makes who you are.

Subjective what on earth is subjective but the objective macroscopic reality statistically manipulated by the quantum chaos of one's life trajectory that took you to all your definitions. It is a real thing what happened to you. You are the witness and your character and knowledge is the result. We are all so same and so different because of chaos theory. Subjective has universality in it. Probably all can describe similarly what eating a chocolate feels like. It will differ a bit but not really in what matters. If you lick one's brain while they eat chocolate you will get a disgusting raw meat taste. Of course you wont find anything there. It is in the connections that relate all past consumption of chocolate, the instant identification of the previously experienced joy.

Are you trying to find what mind is, what a thought is? What is traffic? Is there such a thing as traffic independent of the distribution of cars and drivers' choices that produce it? Thinking is the experiencing of the by now fast game (we got good at it from what stupid joke it was at age 1,2,3 right ok maybe cute in its pureness at 3,4?), a sequence of connections that trigger each other typically in directions previously rewarded as appropriate with a little chance for experimentation motivated by randomness affected by mood and environment.

What makes the most adorable age for kids between 3-4? A complete age of innocence and direct non overly manipulative acting. Only a little crying is the sole manipulation seen. The rest is simplicity, innocence, friendship, curiosity, directness, selfishness but then sadness and happiness at its purest level. Where did that all go and died with time? Are you better now? Could you ever go back? Do you even remember or do you have the others to tell you and videos and pictures? Did you listen to yourself talking at age 3-4? What could ever be inside that brain but something much simpler, honest, genuine, clumsy and naive.

Why do poor people have many kids? Do i dare produce the ultimate hubris? I apologize for my audacity to guess from a position of substantial comfort and only limited but well focused experience of adversity. Could it be that besides the randomness and entertaining disorienting joy of human connection, in all misery surrounding them, the only shining moment is an eternal stream of 3-4 year olds running around in bliss, killing effectively all the ugliness that exists outside in the street, recovering one more time how pure it all can be at that moment of exploration at the transformation point of becoming a self conscious "human".

To be the thinker you are today took years. Time damn it is so important. Living is important. What kind of thinker were you at 9? You were but really what? What were your priorities that time? Do you see how emergent it all is? Did you ever have a moment you didn't know what a chocolate tasted like? What about alcohol? What about an Asian pear? Could it be you arrived at older age without all of these to recall there was a time after 4 that you still didn't know...Life forms your thinking and perceptions. The relentless training game we have going on for one or two or three billion seconds...

Maybe another way to approach this is to answer the question 'what is 'taste'?'. What does it mean to taste something?

Consider that the qualities of chocolate are specific to chocolate and so the "taste" of chocolate is the same for you and I .

In the same manner our sight via the eyes expresses what vision we receive and is not a function of our individual make up. Of course it is possible that we see differently in the case of diminished or enhanced vision, etc...

The sight, taste, sound, and our senses in specifics are not our creation but again, specific to that to which we observe, taste,...

The further conclusion which can be reached intellectually is that the world through which we perceive through our senses are actually within us such that the picture or sight to which we experience, in an evolutionary sense,burrowed into our being and formed the eye.

Put another way our senses are eternal nature which has formed itself within our self. Goethe spoke to this in that "only like can know like". We are within nature with our senses being the portals to the externality of likeness.

There's more for cognition and thinking are within the process but definitely not the creators of our senses of externality.

Berkeley spoke to immaterialism as the only existence and placed the emphasis on the "G" word to explain our cognitive phenomenon but of course he would be banished to the fruit loops science and I'll stop there.

Kind of like explaining everything about how sight is this thing with photons to a blind person wouldn't help them experience a painting.

Most things that happen in this universe are inaccessible to us. Trees falling unobserved in the forest. Alien weddings in galaxy 9542531004723. The atom 17th closest to the center of the sun. Smoke on the water. So is it really so odd that your experience of tasting chocolate is inaccessible to me?

No experiment can be exactly repeated. Even the same experimenter with the same equipment cannot exactly repeat the experiment he just did. The experiment happens and passes into the inaccessible past. We have the data but we never have the compete data. We never really "knew" the experiment and we never will because now it's gone forever. The experiment was what it was and if we consider what it was to be the product of the experiment (rather than the data) then we do not know the product of the experiment and we never will. This is true for any experiment including the experiment of Jack Black tasting chocolate.




PairTheBoard

I wonder if it so specific. Maybe a hypnotist with a blindfold could make it taste like anything.

Although maybe there are sharper examples. I don't know what heroin is like, for example. Maybe one day the utilitarians will put it in the water supply.

Chocolate speaks for itself !

Hot chocolate may taste different than cold, refrigerator chocolate but this is no more than a function of their respective positions within a cosmic entelechy , the hypnotist being one of the specifics of the situation.

The color red painted on a background of black appears stronger than the same red on a white background. This is not a trick nor is a machine right in measuring wavelengths for the essence of sight and in truth the essence of the human being is lost in the machine.

Ask the machine men to teach Leonardo da Vinci on the magic of colors and he would laugh at them as would any real artist of the present day.

The intellectually dynamic versus the intellectual structure of the static.

Ok, I'll stop....the best to you.

The ever-so-slight difference is that we have absolutely no access to what it is like to be anything but who we specifically are.

I really don't even have a guess about what colors look like to a mantis shrimp, or what chocolate tastes like to some weirdo who says that they don't like chocolate. There aren't even any clues, no way of reasoning it out, etc.

For the stuff you mentioned, at least I have some clues available, or can make an estimate, or can reason about it.

I considered this as a possible answer to whether utilitarianism can be brought into line with deontology. You'd need a lot of heroin and a time machine and there'd be some major causal (time line) disturbances that would need working out.

I think you have a lot more clues about what it's like to be another person tasting chocolate than you have about being a star going super nova or a cheese sandwich getting grilled.


PairTheBoard

I don't find it that hard for inanimate objects with no sensory apparatus. I simply concentrate really hard on what it is like to be one of my discarded tonails.

A grilled cheese (medium cheddar) sandwich (wheat bread) tastes excellent. In America or in India or in Antarctica, or in Outer Space between Mars and Jupiter, or in the Andromeda Galaxy. Same thing applies to Beer.

And we have a clue what it's like to taste chocolate ourselves. Can't quite remember exactly...you know, I don't have a piece in my mouth right now.

Under the authority vested in me through a lifetime pursuit of atrocious enjoyment before and after theoretical calculations i hereby authorize the automatic memory recovery moment


(damn only 3 left, i will only allow them to become 2 after a new order is in place but i will resist...maybe)




Here. Thats how easy it is to crash subjective whateverology. Can we do better Godiva, Belgian etc. Sure. Bring it. You know it. Objectivity got this.

After nothing but Hershey's as a kid I still remember the first time I tasted a Cadbury. It was like a spiritual experience.


PairTheBoard

Your post is self-contradictory. Fruit & nut is so good that it's pure madness to buy it in bulk.

I find it greatly amusing that people now eat what would have been considered worse than baking chocolate by itself on purpose.