Also, from what you have said it does not follow that all "mental content" is to be "located" in the brain. That you have brain correlates is not surprising, if only for the fact that without them you would need to wonder what the heck the brain is doing. But you will not find, in the materialist account, a way in which to account for abstraction in the brain. You cannot account for the concept "square" by appealing to the alone (as opposed to say the image of a particular square).
What's wrong with assuming that abstraction is a function of neural activity which is facilitated by specific neural structures and processes?
Questioning, debating and trying to refute someone else's wow moment is a wow moment!
I find a more prosaic version of this question quite interesting too. If you can feel a touch/heat anywhere on or in your body its represented in the brain somehow, somewhere. For a moment (i) imagine the brain is sensitive to touch (it isn't because lack of 'pain' receptors) (ii) that the representation of a sensitive part of our body is localized in the brain rather than distributed.
What this gives us is a mapping from the entire body (that includes the brain) into itself. Now, if there is a fixed point of this mapping, that fixed point is aware of itself.
Is the brain insensitive to touch because its not biologically/physically possible for a localized region of space not to be aware of itself ?
EDIT: Downvote ! That was rather unexpected.
edit: since the other poster edited their comment, this was only responding to the infinite regression question, not their bizarre point about touch sensitivity
By definition: that space must contain a sizeable, or even complete, portion of all human knowledge that can ever be scrolled or exist in that image space.
A lot of noise too, but the complete cure for cancer (if possible), FTL (if possible), immortality: what answers absolutely cannot be represented as several variations of the pixels of a 640x480 image?
Your brain isn't sensitive to touch because it's inside your skull, so that touch information wouldn't do a whole lot for you. There's no reason in principal a brain couldn't have pressure sensitive neurons inside of itself or on its surface.
Our bone marrow is inside our bones. Trust me, it is not pleasant to touch.
It makes sense to evolve pain sensitivity in your bones because if you are doing something which is causing damage inside your bones, you had better have a signal to stop. For most of the evolutionary history of humanity, if your skull was compromised, you would be dead.
I don't see what this has to do with pain perception in the brain. I am sure you could find an example in the animal kingdom of a creature which has pain receptors in its brain if you look hard enough.
If 'events at point_a' gets consciously interpreted by participation of cells one of which, lets call it point_b, is singularly dedicated to sensing events at point_a, we have a mapping in a mathematical sense from point a to point b. We know all such point_bs form a strict subset of the body, a part of the central nervous system.
If this mapping is continuous in the mathematical sense and a contraction, then a fixed point has to exist (a location that does its own interpretation). But the fixed point seems biologically implausible, that leaves us with the alternative that there has to be dead-zones -- places where events can happen but cannot be interpreted. (Example blind spot in the eye)
The way to avoid dead-zone would be to break continuity, or contractive property of the mapping.
> I am sure you could find an example … of a creature which has pain receptors in the brain …
I think my point would be easier to state for this hypothetical creature. If interpretation of pain is done by a strict subset of its cells and there is a one to one mapping -- at least one location b that interprets pain occurring at location a exclusively (presumably that's how the creature knows the pain is at 'a'), can this creature be free of dead-zones if the mapping is continuous and contractive. Can any creature free of dead-zones exist under those conditions. You claimed 'why not'. I am saying that if the mapping is a continuous contraction then either there has to exist dead zones or there is at least one self interpreting location.
To give another example of this phenomenon, if you spread the map of your city somewhere in your city, there has to exist at least one point in the map that sits exactly above the point it is representing -- the fixed point. The way to avoid this would be to have 'tears' in the map, or to have points in your city that are not closer on the map than they are in the city (that would be an unusual map).
The gist of it is that if there is a continuous mapping from a set to itself with the property that the mapped points are closer than the original points there must exist a point that maps to itself.
Now if the pain location mapping is smooth and a contraction (not implausible because number of cells in the brain is smaller than the number of cells in the entire body), there would be a neuron in the brain that would have been self aware in the sense that its pain mapping would have mapped to itself.
Note it is possible to avoid having a fixed point for a mapping from a set itself (consider a permutation of numbers 1..n so that no number is in its own place).
It is just an intriguing notion -- is a fixed point, self aware neuron possible
Imagine this, say what everyone perceives as the color red I perceive it as what everyone else perceives as yellow. But since I have been taught the name of the colors by these people, I will end up matching the names of the colors although I am perceiving something very different.
This needs to be considered in debates on whether animals have consciousness, do they have an "I". The dominant popular belief is that they aren't. My question is, devoid of a common communication language how would you find out. Only thing we have is their observable external behavior. If that is consistent with the 'consciousness' hypothesis, then that's all we can say. In that case we have about as much evidence of presence of consciousness that a fellow human incapable of communicating with us in language as much as another animal say a dolphin. In both the cases its a hypothesis that explains externally observable behavior.
Till we find a way to listen into one's internal monologue this is pretty much all we can do.
I like Feynman's example of the 'inside of a brick' no one has seen that with an unaided human eye. Before other forms of sensing the 'inside' came along (X-ray, ultrasound, ...) it was just a hypothesis that fit observable experience. No one would have actually seen the inside of a brick. When you break it open, its no longer the 'inside'. That there is no 'inside' and that a new surface is formed by the be the act of breaking the brick could have been a plausible alternative hypothesis. Existence of an 'inside' is just a simpler hypothesis.
It's been mind boggling to me for years that this isn't the default accepted position. That most intelligent life (ie animals) are conscious just like us. Look at what dogs, cats, monkeys do. In what possible way can you say they aren't conscious but another person you can't speak with is? Based on what evidence?
The fact we try and reserve consciousness for humans is the most "epi-cycles in support of geocentrism" thing I've ever seen in science. It's silly. It's wholly unscientific, in fact it's anti-science as it actively avoids the most scientific explanation to reach a conclusion that "we're special".
Its flawed and a stain on science.
This is part of the "knowledge argument":
It is a bit like a web-page with many dom-elements on it, each having its own id. The id is like our perceptions. The id is arbitrary but what matters is that the same id always refers to the same dom-element.
I mean I don't even know what I perceive when I perceive red. I just perceive and use the id "red" for it. The thing is that in our brain there is some kind of an id associated with our experience of redness. When we experience it we say hey I recognize this experience as something familiar, so I will use the same id 'red' to describe it as I have before.
How would you know this if you've never experienced how I experience it?
> We use language and shared culture to consensually hallucinate a "shared" universe but no such thing truly exists for us.
You seem to suggest that culture is some shared fantasy superimposed on reality, but how could it be given your solipsism? How could anything be shared?
> We can perceive objects and describe them in similar ways
How would you know? Maybe I mean different things when I speak. Maybe my speech isn't speech at all and you're just construing it as such? Maybe there is no me?
> but the fact remains that we can't access the universe that the objects truly exist in (if that even exists)
How would you know without being able to "access" the universe to make that comparison? Are you a gnostic with secret knowledge (in which case, you do have access)? You've also already assumed a distinction between universe and mind, but how could you if all you have are these "representations", as you call them? The distinction would itself just be a mental "representation".
> since, for us, they have no independent existence outside of our mental representation.
If there is no reality to represent, then they aren't mental representations, are they.
> Or shortly, when you die the universe dies with you.
The universe you don't know actually exists? But if it exists, why should it die with you?
P.S. Less weed, more rigor.