Sound Research WIKINDX

p. 436  

"Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it [...] the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism [...] fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2023-05-24 11:48:30)

Keywords:   Animals, Environment, Perception, Presence, Consciousness

p. 436  

"We may call this the subjective character of experience [...] It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing."

Footnote for this quote: "Perhaps there could not actually be such robots. Perhaps anything complex enough to behave like a person would have experiences. But that, if true, is a fact which cannot be discovered merely by analyzing the concept of experience."

  Added by: alexb44  (2025-05-31 16:41:45)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 437  

"If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it: seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2025-03-02 04:52:10)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 438  

"I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species)."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2023-05-24 13:17:42)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 438  

"But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2025-05-08 03:10:57)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 439  

"Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task"

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2023-05-24 13:21:22)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

pp. 440–441  

"The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own. It would be fine if someone were to develop concepts and a theory that enabled us to think about those things; but such an understanding may be permanently denied to us by the limits of our nature. And to deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2023-05-24 13:28:04)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 441  

"My realism about the subjective domain in all its forms implies a belief in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts [...] But one might also believe that there are facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted forever—simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2023-05-24 13:32:14)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 441  

"there would have been transfinite numbers even if everyone had been wiped out by the Black Death before Cantor discovered them"

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2025-05-08 03:27:45)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 443  

"A Martian scientist with no understanding of visual perception could understand the rainbow, or lightning, or clouds as physical phenomena, though he would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud, or the place these things occupy in our phenomenal world. The objective nature of the things picked out by these concepts could be apprehended by him because, although the concepts themselves are connected with a particular point of view and a particular visual phenomenology, the things apprehended from that point of view are not: they are observable from the point of view but external to it; hence they can be comprehended from other points of view also, either by the same organisms or by others. Lightning has an objective character that is not exhausted by its visual appearance, and this can be investigated by a Martian without vision. To be precise, it has a more objective character than is revealed in its visual appearance. In speaking of the move from subjective to objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about the existence of an end point, the completely objective intrinsic nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel. And in understanding a phenomenon like lightning, it is legitimate to go as far away as one can from a strictly human viewpoint."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2025-05-12 01:41:10)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence, Artificial Intelligence, Embodied cognition, Embodiment

p. 444  

Footnote 10 has this: "[W]hen I look at the "Mona Lisa," my visual experience has a certain quality, no trace of which is to be found by someone looking into my brain."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2023-05-24 13:48:12)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 445  

"In a sense, the seeds of this objection to the reducibility of experience are already detectable in successful cases of reduction; for in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2025-03-02 05:23:36)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Definition of sound, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 445  

"Members of radically different species may both understand the same physical events in objective terms, and this does not require that they understand the phenomenal forms in which those events appear to the senses of members of the other species. Thus it is a condition of their referring to a common reality that their more particular viewpoints are not part of the common reality that they both apprehend."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2025-05-12 02:14:21)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 447  

"This explains the magical flavor of popular presentations of fundamental scientific discoveries, given out as propositions to which one must subscribe without really understanding them. For example, people are now told at an early age that all matter is really energy. But despite the fact that they know what "is" means, most of them never form a conception of what makes this claim true, because they lack the theoretical background."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2023-05-24 14:00:29)

Keywords:   Knowledge

p. 447  

"the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it might be true"

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2023-05-24 14:04:32)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence

p. 450  

"it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it."

  Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard  (2023-05-24 14:11:07)

Keywords:   Animals, Bats, Consciousness, Environment, Perception, Presence