Again, the point here is that if you have a brain and sensory organs that allow it, qualia are no longer ineffable. They only seem so because humans have limited hardware.
And because of something about qualia, since the ineffability applies only to them.
Uh-huh. So we have a physical explanation of qualia. Where was that published?
We understand information science well enough to understand that knowledge and computation do not work in the naive way that philosophers think about them—and in a way that is directly applicable to dissolving this question.
It is naive to suppose all philosophers think the same way.
Mary’s Room depends on an abstract conception of knowledge—the idea that knowledge is independent of its representation. But in the real world, knowledge is never separable from a physical representation of that knowledge, and it is always subject to computational constraints imposed by that physical representation.
Learning and education depend on an abstract conception of knowledge. A researcher can dump the knowledge in their brain into
a book which is then absorbed by a professor and taught to students.
Mary’s brain is computationally constrained as to what physical states it can enter by way of conscious intervention, lacking any physical input from the outside world. So it should be no surprise at all there will exist mental states that can be brought about by outside input and cannot be brought about through “knowledge” of a verbal kind.
No, but it should be a surpise that out of eveything she could know, only one is dependent on the instantiation
of a physical brain state.
In other words, the ineffability of any given experience is a reflection of the limits of our brains, rather than representing some mystical quality of experience. And Mary’s Room only seems puzzling because our inbuilt intuitions about thinking lead us to believe that we should be able to know things (experience brain states) that we aren’t physically capable of.
We have that intuition because evetything but qualia works that way. Why are qualia different?
As I said, this is a great example of where philosophers argue at length about things that have as much connection to empirical reality as angels on the head of a pin do. We have no need of nonphysical hypotheses to explain such basic matters as untranslatable or incommunicable knowledge.
You haven’t actually explained the uniqueness of qualia at this point.
Your request for a “physical explanation of qualia” is a case in point, because there isn’t anything that needs explaining about qualia.
What needs explaining is why they alone need physical instantiation to be known.
If you taboo the word “qualia”, and ask what it expands to, then you get one of various possible obvious and non-contradictory explanations. Personally, for purposes of the Mary’s Room discussion, I expand “qualia” as “brain states that cannot be transmitted between humans without reference to prior experience by the recipient”… which makes the paradox vanish immediately.
Why can other brain states be understood without transmission? We expect Mary to understand memory, cognition,
etc.
Of course we would not expect Mary to be able to be directed to the brain states that can represent “red” if it is a state that can’t be transmitted between humans without reference to prior experience by the recipient. It is only the false implicit assumption that humans can place themselves into arbitrary brain states through conscious intervention that leads anyone to think the question’s a paradox.
It is the true fact that qualia alone have this epistemological uniqueness that makes it a puzzle.
That’s why people pushing the paradox angle keep saying, “ah, but Mary knows everything about red”
Everything physical, ie all 3rd person descriptions.
-- which is hiding the assumption under the expansion of the word “know”.
This is a requirement, because unless we posit that Mary has infinite brain capacity (i.e., not a human being), she cannot possibly have a brain simulating everything about red!
or anything else. Why is that not a problem in the case of everything else.
So, when you expand “know” and “red” (as an instance of qualia) with some simple clarity, the entire paradox dissolves into a stupid question that didn’t need to be asked in the first place… not unlike the dissolution of the tree-sound argument in the “Proper Uses Of Words” Sequence.
Hmm. So either the qualiaphiles are missing something...or you are.
And because of something about qualia, since the ineffability applies only to them.
Uh, no, because “qualia” is just a word applied to things we don’t know how to describe without reference to experience.
In other words, it’s a term about language… not a term about the experiences being described.
Learning and education depend on an abstract conception of knowledge. A researcher can dump the knowledge in their brain into a book which is then absorbed by a professor and taught to students.
And that knowledge is represented in various physical forms: books, sights, sounds, symbols. The “abstractions” themselves are then physically represented by neural patterns in brains. At no time during this process is there anything non-physical occurring.
When you, as an observer, look on this process and claim that abstractions exist, what you are saying is that in your brain, there is a physical representation of a repeating pattern in your perception. When you say, “Person A communicated idea X to Person B”, you are describing representations in your head, not the physical reality.
The physical reality is, you saw a set of atoms creating certain vibrations in the air, which led to chemical changes in another chunk of atoms nearby. As part of the process, the atoms in your brain also rearranged themselves, creating a—wait for it—abstracted representation of the events that took place.
In other words, all “abstraction” takes place in physical brains. It doesn’t exist anywhere else.
No, but it should be a surpise that out of eveything she could know, only one is dependent on the instantiation of a physical brain state.
You’ve got that backwards. It should be no surprise at all that we can’t directly communicate experience, because we don’t have any physical organs for doing that. We do have organs for transmitting and receiving symbolic communication: in other words, signals that stand for things.
And in order to communicate by signals, the referents of the signals have to be known in advance. So, it is utterly and completely unsurprising that we have to be able to point to something red to communicate the idea of red.
Why can other brain states be understood without transmission? We expect Mary to understand memory, cognition, etc.
Because she’s experienced them, and thus has referents that allow symbolic communication to take place. (If she hadn’t experienced them, we also likely wouldn’t be able to communicate with her at all!)
[several comments/questions implying specialness or puzzlingness of qualia]
Suppose I make up a term, foogly, and claim it is special. When you ask for some examples of this word, I point to various species of non-flying birds. You then say to me, “Those are just birds that don’t fly.”
“But ah!” I say, “Out of all the birds in the world, there are only these species of bird that don’t fly. Clearly, there is something special about fooglies. What a puzzle!”
You say, “But they’re just birds that can’t fly!”
“Ah, but you haven’t explained why they’re special!”
“There’s nothing to explain! Some don’t have wings big enough, or muscles strong enough, or they lived in an area where it wasn’t advantageous any more to fly, or whatever.”
“Ah,” I retort. “But then how come it’s only fooglies that don’t fly! You haven’t explained anything.”
“But, but...” you stammer. “You just made up that word, such that it means ‘birds that don’t fly’. The commonality isn’t in the birds—those different species of birds have nothing to do with each other. The commonality between them is in the word, that you made up to put them together. It has no more inherent rightness of grouping than that aboriginal word for ‘women, fire, and dangerous things’. You’re arguing about a word.”
“That’s all very nice,” I say, “but you still haven’t explained fooglies.”
At this point, you are quite likely to think I am an idiot.
I, on the other hand, merely think you have failed to understand the sequence on the Proper Uses of Words—a bare minimum requirement for having an intelligent discussion on Less Wrong about topics like this one.
The LW standard for philosophical discussion requires reference to things in the world. That, as far as possible, we expand our terms until the symbols are grounded in physical things, where we can agree or disagree about the physical things, rather than the words being used to describe the things.
When you do that, a huge swath of philosophical “puzzles” dissolve into thin air as the mirages that they are. There is nothing special about qualia, because it’s a made-up word for “things we can’t communicate symbolically without experiential referent”.
What’s more, even that definition is still a red herring, because there is nothing we can communicate symbolically without experiential referent. All our abstract words are actually built up from more concrete ones, such that we have the illusion that there are things that we can describe without experiential referent.
Take “abstract”, for example. The only way to learn what that word means is by concrete examples of abstractions! To know what “communication” is, you have to have experienced some concrete forms of communication first
If language is a pyramid of concepts, each abstraction built up on others from more concrete concepts and experiences, then at some point there is a bottom or base to this pyramid… and the term qualia is simply pointing to all these things at the bottom of the pyramid, and claiming that they must be special somehow because, well, they’re all at the bottom of the pyramid.
Yeah, they’re at the bottom. So what? All it means is that they’re stuff your brain has neural inputs already in place for, just like the only thing in common between birds that don’t fly is that they lack the capacity to fly.
In other words, it’s not a word for something special. It’s a word for things that aren’t special. Every animal with a brain has neural inputs, so qualia are abundant in the physical world.
It’s only humans who think there’s anything special about them, because humans also have the capacity to process symbols. And in fact, we are so accustomed to thinking in symbols, and being able to communicate in symbols, that we are surprised when we find ourselves unable to communicate symbolically about something.
But this is the exact same experience that we have when trying to communicate anything symbolically without a common reference point. As frustrating as it may feel, the simple truth is that you cannot communicate anything symbolically without a reference point, because symbols have to stand for something, that both parties to the communication have in common.
It’s just that normally, we have no need to try to communicate something without a reference point.
Anyway, if you understand this much, then it’s plain that Mary’s Room is just a bunch of self-defeating words that can’t happen in reality. For Mary to have “knowledge” of red, it has to have been communicated to her, either experientially or symbolically.
But, for it to have been communicated symbolically, there had to be a referent in experience… which would mean she’d have to have experienced red.
That’s the physical reality, so this “thought experiment” cannot possibly take place physically.
Now, if you hypothesize a robot Mary or an alien Mary who has organs for communicating direct neural perception, or who has the ability to directly alter brain state, great. But in that case, Mary would not experience any surprise, since Mary would already have been able to induce the brain state in question.
Since a human Mary lacks either of these abilities, it should not be surprising that we cannot symbolically convey anything to her that is not grounded in something she already knows. That’s just how symbolic communication works.
And because of something about qualia, since the ineffability applies only to them.
Uh, no, because “qualia” is just a word applied to things we don’t know how to describe without reference to experience.
That’s vaguely phrased. “Quale” is defined as a term for sensory qualities and phenomenal feels. It is a further, non definitional fact that the set of qualia so defined coincides with the set of ineffable things.
In other words, it’s a term about language… not a term about the experiences being described.
If you look at the locus classicus, CI Lewis’s definition, qualia are not defined in terms of language at all.
“There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these “qualia.” But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. They
round in practice”.
Moreover, ineffability is two-sided: a particular class of entities isn’t describable in a particular language.
You can’t put all the blame on language L when L can describe other thing adequately.
.. it should be a surpise that out of eveything she could know, only one is dependent on the instantiation of a physical brain state.
You’ve got that backwards. It should be no surprise at all that we can’t directly communicate experience, because we don’t have any physical organs for doing that. We do have organs for transmitting and receiving symbolic communication: in other words, signals that stand for things. And in order to communicate by signals, the referents of the signals have to be known in advance.
That is vaguely phrased. Of course, one has to know the meaning og signal-states in some sense. However,
it is not clear that every symbol must match up one-for-one with a sensory referent. Moreover, abstract terms
seem to work differently to concrete ones.
So, it is utterly and completely unsurprising that we have to be able to point to something red to communicate the idea of red.
It is only unsurprising if you have adopted a theory according to which someone would have to be acquainted by direct
refrence with pentagons in order to understand the string “pentagon”. However, that is not the case.
Why can other brain states be understood without transmission? We expect Mary to understand memory, cognition, etc.
Because she’s experienced them, and thus has referents that allow symbolic communication to take place.
Does the super-neuroscientists Mary understand dementia,psychosis, etc, in your opinion? Does she
have experiences of excitation levels accross her synaptic clefts?
(If she hadn’t experienced them, we also likely wouldn’t be able to communicate with her at all!)
It’s begining to look like all male gynecologists should be sacked.
Suppose I make up a term, foogly, and claim it is special. When you ask for some examples of this word, I point to various species of non-flying birds. You then say to me, “Those are just birds that don’t fly.”
[..]
“But, but...” you stammer. “You just made up that word, such that it means ‘birds that don’t fly’. The commonality isn’t in the birds—those different species of birds have nothing to do with each other. The commonality between them is in the word, that you made up to put them together. It has no more inherent rightness of grouping than that aboriginal word for ‘women, fire, and dangerous things’. You’re arguing about a word.”
Again, qualia isn’t defined as “whatever is ineffable”, so the analogy isn’t analogous.
“That’s all very nice,” I say, “but you still haven’t explained fooglies.”
At this point, you are quite likely to think I am an idiot.
I, on the other hand, merely think you have failed to understand the sequence on the Proper Uses of Words—a bare minimum requirement for having an intelligent discussion on Less Wrong about topics like this one.
Do you? I think I was hacking that stuff when EY was in diapers. And you’re not using “quale” properly.
That, as far as possible, we expand our terms until the symbols are grounded in physical things, where we can agree or disagree about the physical things, rather than the words being used to describe the things.”
Please explain how that theory applies to mathematics.
When you do that, a huge swath of philosophical “puzzles” dissolve into thin air as the mirages that they are. There is nothing special about qualia, because it’s a made-up word for “things we can’t communicate symbolically without experiential referent”.
I’ve heard it all before. Projects to Dissolve all Philosophical Problems have been tried in the past, with disappointing results.
What’s more, even that definition is still a red herring, because there is nothing we can communicate symbolically without experiential referent.
So you say. That’s an unproven theory, for one thing. For another, there seem to be robust counterexamples, such
as the ability of physicsts and mathematicians to communicate about unexperiencable higher dimensional spaces.
If language is a pyramid of concepts, each abstraction built up on others from more concrete concepts and experiences, then at some point there is a bottom or base to this pyramid… and the term qualia is simply pointing to all these things at the bottom of the pyramid, and claiming that they must be special somehow because, well, they’re all at the bottom of the pyramid.
If they are at the bottom of the pyramid, they are special. You current agument, that what is at the
bottom of the pyramid cannot be explained relies on that. And it amount to gainsaying the premise of Mary’s
Room: Mary doens’t know everything about how the brain works, because he doesn’t know how qualia work,because
no reductive explanation of qualia is available, because qualia cannot be reduced to simpler concepts because
they are at the bottom of the pyramid.
In other words, it’s not a word for something special. It’s a word for things that aren’t special. Every animal with a brain has neural inputs, so qualia are abundant in the physical world.
That’s vaguely phrased. You have conceded it is special with regard to its place in the conceptual hierarchy
and its communicabulity, for all that you are holding out that a metaphysical explanation isn’t required.
But this is the exact same experience that we have when trying to communicate anything symbolically without a common reference point.
So: are attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials doomed?
But, for it to have been communicated symbolically, there had to be a referent in experience… which would mean she’d have to have experienced red.
And she’d have to have a stroke to understand the effects of stroke on the brain? You need to be clearer about
the difference between grounding symbol systems,and finding referents for individual symbols.
That’s the physical reality, so this “thought experiment” cannot possibly take place physically.
You are taking it as a thought experiment where she succesfully learns colur qualia, although
the expected outcome of the original story is that she doens’t.
You have conceded it is special with regard to its place in the conceptual hierarchy and its communicabulity, for all that you are holding out that a metaphysical explanation isn’t required.
I’ve conceded that they’re as special as birds that don’t fly. That is, that they’re things which don’t require any special explanation. One of the things you learn from computer programming is that recursion has to bottom out somewhere. To me, the idea that there are experiential primitives is no more surprising than the fact that computer languages have primitive operations: that’s what you make the non-primitives out of. No more surprising than the idea that at some point, we’ll stop discovering new levels of fundamental particles.
Among programmers, it can be a fun pastime to see just how few primitives you can have in a language, but evolution doesn’t have a brain that enjoys such games. So it’s unsurprising that evolution would work almost exclusively in the form of primitives—in other words, a very wide-bottomed pyramid.
Humans are the special ones—the only species that unquestionably uses recursive symbolic communication, and is therefore the only species that makes conceptual pyramids at all.
So, from my point of view, anything that’s not a primitive neural event is the thing that needs a special explanation!
[mathematicians, male gynecologists, etc.]
You appear to be distorting my argument, by conflating experiential primitives and experiential grounding. Humans can communicate metaphorically, analogously, and in various other ways… but all of that communication takes place either in symbols (grounded in some prior experience), or through the direct analog means available to us (tone of voice, movement, drawing, facial expressions) to ground a communication in some actual, present-moment experience.
But, I expect you already knew that, which makes me think you’re simply trolling.
Why are you here, exactly?
Clearly, you’re not a Bayesian reductionist, nor do you appear to show any interest whatsoever in becoming one. In not one comment have I ever seen you learn something from your participation, nor do I see anything that suggests you have any interest in learning anything, or really doing anything else but generating a feeling of superiority through your ability to remain unconvinced of anything while putting on a show of your education.
Your language about arguments and concessions strongly suggest that you think this is a debating society, or that arguments are soldiers to be sent forth in support of a bottom line...
And I don’t think I’ve ever seen you ask a single question that wasn’t of the rhetorical, trying-to-score-points-off-your-opponent variety, which suggests you have very little interest in becoming… well, any less wrong than you currently are.
I’ve conceded that [qualia] are as special as birds that don’t fly.
That’s vaguely phrased. What does “special” mean? Is my guess about metaphysical explanation correct.?
That is, that they’re things which don’t require any special explanation. One of the things you learn from computer programming is that recursion has to bottom out somewhere.
I know. I’m a programmer.
[mathematicians, male gynecologists, etc.]
You appear to be distorting my argument, by conflating experiential primitives and experiential grounding. Humans can communicate metaphorically, analogously, and in various other ways… but all of that communication takes place either in symbols (grounded in some prior experience), or through the direct analog means available to us (tone of voice, movement, drawing, facial expressions) to ground a communication in some actual, present-moment experience.
You appear to be not even responding to my arguments.
Why are you here, exactly?
I am here to evaluate ideas and argumnents.
Clearly, you’re not a Bayesian reductionist,
I have studied Bayesian reductionism and I find it flawed. I can explain why. Are you saying I
should not be examining it critically, or that I should accept it in spite of its flaws?
nor do you appear to show any interest whatsoever in becoming one.
What sort of effort would that involve? Do you realise how religious your language sounds—“you need
to try harder to believe”?
In not one comment have I ever seen you learn something from your participation,
Well, Sir, I haven’t seen you learn anything from me.
nor do I see anything that suggests you have any interest in learning anything, or really doing anything else but generating a feeling of superiority through your ability to remain unconvinced of anything while putting on a show of your education.
Most ideas are wrong, so I remain unconvinced by most of them.
Your language about arguments and concessions strongly suggest that you think this is a debating society, or that arguments are soldiers to be sent forth in support of a bottom line...
What are these forums for if not for debate? Are participants supposed to accept things uncritically? That’s not
rationallity where I come from.
And I don’t think I’ve ever seen you ask a single question that wasn’t of the rhetorical, trying-to-score-points-off-your-opponent variety, which suggests you have very little interest in becoming… well, any less wrong than you currently are.
Try considering the hypothesis that all that is true, and is explained by my already knowing how to be rational.
I mean, do you think LW has cornered some market in rationality? Do you think everyone who visits these
boards can be assumed to be naively empty-headed? Do you think it might be a step forward to base
your ad hominems on actual characteristics rather than assumed ones?
What are these forums for if not for debate? Are participants supposed to accept things uncritically? That’s not rationallity where I come from.
Way to conflate three entirely different things to suggest various deniable conclusions. A terrific example of the sort of “Dark Arts” debating tactics we are not interested in having on LessWrong.
I think perhaps you’re looking for the Argument Clinic, instead.
I’m the irritant that produces the pearl.
In other words, you admit to being a troll. Thanks for clarifying that.
Congratulations on at least not being an immediately obvious one; I originally mistook you for an educable single-topic visitor from another site (rather than a determined troll), who might actually be educable. So, I’ll stop replying entirely now.
This and your recent other discussions about qualia and zombies are a great example of getting useful explanations thanks to trolls. It finally clicked for me that an algorithmic explanation doesn’t actually “leave anything out” and that reductionism doesn’t fail. I kept reading “Mind Projection Fallacy”, but couldn’t see how I was committing it. Thanks for your efforts, PJ!
I kept reading “Mind Projection Fallacy”, but couldn’t see how I was committing it. Thanks for your efforts, PJ!
I’m glad someone got some use out of it.
a great example of getting useful explanations thanks to trolls
You (or someone else) could have gotten just as good of an explanation out of me by saying, “I don’t understand how that’s committing the MPF”, so that’s not really evidence in favor of trolls being valuable.
What’s valuable is persistence, in that if you ask the question only once and stop saying, “yeah, but what I don’t get about that is...”, ” wouldn’t that then cause/mean...”, etc., until you get a satisfactory answer.
Trolls are certainly persistent, but that doesn’t mean the resulting conversation record will necessarily be of any use, alas.
You (or someone else) could have gotten just as good of an explanation out of me by saying, “I don’t understand how that’s committing the MPF”, so that’s not really evidence in favor of trolls being valuable.
Sure, in principle, but what really happened was that I read the first few explanations (mostly by Elizier and Dennett) and thought, “Nah, that doesn’t really work. How am I projecting anything? You are all ignoring consciousness!”. When others then mentioned the position, I automatically dismissed it. Only by seeing people stubbornly bring up really bad arguments against reductionism did I finally snap, “C’mon! I’m on your side, but that’s just stupid. If $belief about qualia were true, how would you ever know? What’s the different anticipation here? … Waitaminnit, what am I anticipating here?” and that unraveled the whole thing in the end.
What are these forums for if not for debate? Are participants supposed to accept things uncritically? That’s not rationallity where I come from.
Way to conflate three entirely different things to suggest various deniable conclusions.
Asking a number of separate questions is not conflation. If you are not going to answer questions, I can only draw whatever conclusions I can from your silence.
Are the LW forums for debate, or not?
In other words, you admit to being a troll. Thanks for clarifying that.
Congratulations on at least not being an immediately obvious one; I originally mistook you for an educable
Again. you have this absolutely rigid idea that I (? everybody?) can only possibly be a learner (agreer? disciple?) here, although you actually know nothing about me, and therefore have no idea what I might have to teach. But having labelled me Innately Evil, that’s never going to change. There is no fact of the matter that I am the learner and you the teacher; instead, just a bunch of stop signs in your mind.
Outmoded method of production for object-type [pearl]. Slow, inefficient, no quality control. Pearl only has superficial value. Synthetic pearls significantly less valued than organic: no value to actual physical configuration. Value attached to status associated with expensive or difficult-to-produce item. Recommend elimination of object-type [pearl].
(You’re the irritant that produces something pjeby and I don’t want.)
People who view themselves as annoying others because they make them think tend to be trolls. (Other types of trolls include people who consciously troll for lulz, and people who can’t stick to the local unwritten rules.)
I don’t actually know any example of people consciously thinking of themselves as a pearl-producing irritant who aren’t trolls. People who irritate other people and cause them to produce valuable thoughts tend to do most of the thinking themselves with pearls as a smaller side effect (controversial thinkers). The rest tend to be very poor thinkers whose arguments can be reconstructed by more skilled thinkers for interesting results (some theists; Marx), and they try not to be annoying.
I don’t actually know any example of people consciously thinking of themselves as a pearl-producing irritant who aren’t trolls.
To be entirely fair, I have actually known such a person. It manifested as him showing up at a meditation meetup I went to on a regular basis, sitting quietly, not speaking unless directly asked a question, being generally ineffable when asked questions, and quietly giving up when several months (a year?) of this behavior didn’t get the result he was looking for. I wouldn’t even have known why he left if I hadn’t tracked him down and asked.
Quite fair. If non-troll irritants are usually this unintrusive, there’s a selection bias in my known examples.
Did he tell you what result he wanted? FWIW, I would have done what I do when communication norms break down: sit next to him, watch him, mirror him. (Learning his communication style, testing whether he’s trying to teach by example, taming an animal.) Or maybe done what I do when I want to meet someone but am afraid: watch from afar, never dare approach.
It’s not really relevant here, but he was looking to push the group toward Advaita Vedanta.
FWIW, I would have done what I do when communication norms break down: sit next to him, watch him, mirror him. (Learning his communication style, testing whether he’s trying to teach by example, taming an animal.)
This is basically what he was aiming for, but what he was trying to teach was too subtle to really come across in a situation with as many distractions as that one had (it was a rather unusual mediation group) and also the details of his ineffability raised enough warning flags that he had trouble getting people to take him seriously.
He has a blog here if you’re interested, but I should note that its topic and mode of discussion is a potential memetic hazard, along the lines of nihilism but likely harder to recover from.
If you set out to make people think, yeah. You just end up being a gadfly.
If you set out to produce high-quality thoughts because you need them for something else, you’ll make people think. Of course they’ll already be thinkers (but you’re posting on LW).
High quality thoughts have to be able to answer objections. That’s why there is a comment section underneath each post. That is why lecturers call for questions after they have finished. etc etc.
There’s no reason they can’ be both. Of course what we ultimately want is truth.Mysticism says you can grasp the truth about everything in a flash. According to non-mystical epistemology, it’s a question of tentatively building theories and revising or abandoning them if they go wrong. Justification and corroboration are our proxies for truth.
And because of something about qualia, since the ineffability applies only to them.
It is naive to suppose all philosophers think the same way.
Learning and education depend on an abstract conception of knowledge. A researcher can dump the knowledge in their brain into a book which is then absorbed by a professor and taught to students.
No, but it should be a surpise that out of eveything she could know, only one is dependent on the instantiation of a physical brain state.
We have that intuition because evetything but qualia works that way. Why are qualia different?
You haven’t actually explained the uniqueness of qualia at this point.
What needs explaining is why they alone need physical instantiation to be known.
Why can other brain states be understood without transmission? We expect Mary to understand memory, cognition, etc.
It is the true fact that qualia alone have this epistemological uniqueness that makes it a puzzle.
Everything physical, ie all 3rd person descriptions.
-- which is hiding the assumption under the expansion of the word “know”.
or anything else. Why is that not a problem in the case of everything else.
Hmm. So either the qualiaphiles are missing something...or you are.
Uh, no, because “qualia” is just a word applied to things we don’t know how to describe without reference to experience.
In other words, it’s a term about language… not a term about the experiences being described.
And that knowledge is represented in various physical forms: books, sights, sounds, symbols. The “abstractions” themselves are then physically represented by neural patterns in brains. At no time during this process is there anything non-physical occurring.
When you, as an observer, look on this process and claim that abstractions exist, what you are saying is that in your brain, there is a physical representation of a repeating pattern in your perception. When you say, “Person A communicated idea X to Person B”, you are describing representations in your head, not the physical reality.
The physical reality is, you saw a set of atoms creating certain vibrations in the air, which led to chemical changes in another chunk of atoms nearby. As part of the process, the atoms in your brain also rearranged themselves, creating a—wait for it—abstracted representation of the events that took place.
In other words, all “abstraction” takes place in physical brains. It doesn’t exist anywhere else.
You’ve got that backwards. It should be no surprise at all that we can’t directly communicate experience, because we don’t have any physical organs for doing that. We do have organs for transmitting and receiving symbolic communication: in other words, signals that stand for things.
And in order to communicate by signals, the referents of the signals have to be known in advance. So, it is utterly and completely unsurprising that we have to be able to point to something red to communicate the idea of red.
Because she’s experienced them, and thus has referents that allow symbolic communication to take place. (If she hadn’t experienced them, we also likely wouldn’t be able to communicate with her at all!)
Suppose I make up a term, foogly, and claim it is special. When you ask for some examples of this word, I point to various species of non-flying birds. You then say to me, “Those are just birds that don’t fly.”
“But ah!” I say, “Out of all the birds in the world, there are only these species of bird that don’t fly. Clearly, there is something special about fooglies. What a puzzle!”
You say, “But they’re just birds that can’t fly!”
“Ah, but you haven’t explained why they’re special!”
“There’s nothing to explain! Some don’t have wings big enough, or muscles strong enough, or they lived in an area where it wasn’t advantageous any more to fly, or whatever.”
“Ah,” I retort. “But then how come it’s only fooglies that don’t fly! You haven’t explained anything.”
“But, but...” you stammer. “You just made up that word, such that it means ‘birds that don’t fly’. The commonality isn’t in the birds—those different species of birds have nothing to do with each other. The commonality between them is in the word, that you made up to put them together. It has no more inherent rightness of grouping than that aboriginal word for ‘women, fire, and dangerous things’. You’re arguing about a word.”
“That’s all very nice,” I say, “but you still haven’t explained fooglies.”
At this point, you are quite likely to think I am an idiot.
I, on the other hand, merely think you have failed to understand the sequence on the Proper Uses of Words—a bare minimum requirement for having an intelligent discussion on Less Wrong about topics like this one.
The LW standard for philosophical discussion requires reference to things in the world. That, as far as possible, we expand our terms until the symbols are grounded in physical things, where we can agree or disagree about the physical things, rather than the words being used to describe the things.
When you do that, a huge swath of philosophical “puzzles” dissolve into thin air as the mirages that they are. There is nothing special about qualia, because it’s a made-up word for “things we can’t communicate symbolically without experiential referent”.
What’s more, even that definition is still a red herring, because there is nothing we can communicate symbolically without experiential referent. All our abstract words are actually built up from more concrete ones, such that we have the illusion that there are things that we can describe without experiential referent.
Take “abstract”, for example. The only way to learn what that word means is by concrete examples of abstractions! To know what “communication” is, you have to have experienced some concrete forms of communication first
If language is a pyramid of concepts, each abstraction built up on others from more concrete concepts and experiences, then at some point there is a bottom or base to this pyramid… and the term qualia is simply pointing to all these things at the bottom of the pyramid, and claiming that they must be special somehow because, well, they’re all at the bottom of the pyramid.
Yeah, they’re at the bottom. So what? All it means is that they’re stuff your brain has neural inputs already in place for, just like the only thing in common between birds that don’t fly is that they lack the capacity to fly.
In other words, it’s not a word for something special. It’s a word for things that aren’t special. Every animal with a brain has neural inputs, so qualia are abundant in the physical world.
It’s only humans who think there’s anything special about them, because humans also have the capacity to process symbols. And in fact, we are so accustomed to thinking in symbols, and being able to communicate in symbols, that we are surprised when we find ourselves unable to communicate symbolically about something.
But this is the exact same experience that we have when trying to communicate anything symbolically without a common reference point. As frustrating as it may feel, the simple truth is that you cannot communicate anything symbolically without a reference point, because symbols have to stand for something, that both parties to the communication have in common.
It’s just that normally, we have no need to try to communicate something without a reference point.
Anyway, if you understand this much, then it’s plain that Mary’s Room is just a bunch of self-defeating words that can’t happen in reality. For Mary to have “knowledge” of red, it has to have been communicated to her, either experientially or symbolically.
But, for it to have been communicated symbolically, there had to be a referent in experience… which would mean she’d have to have experienced red.
That’s the physical reality, so this “thought experiment” cannot possibly take place physically.
Now, if you hypothesize a robot Mary or an alien Mary who has organs for communicating direct neural perception, or who has the ability to directly alter brain state, great. But in that case, Mary would not experience any surprise, since Mary would already have been able to induce the brain state in question.
Since a human Mary lacks either of these abilities, it should not be surprising that we cannot symbolically convey anything to her that is not grounded in something she already knows. That’s just how symbolic communication works.
That’s vaguely phrased. “Quale” is defined as a term for sensory qualities and phenomenal feels. It is a further, non definitional fact that the set of qualia so defined coincides with the set of ineffable things.
If you look at the locus classicus, CI Lewis’s definition, qualia are not defined in terms of language at all.
“There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these “qualia.” But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. They round in practice”.
Moreover, ineffability is two-sided: a particular class of entities isn’t describable in a particular language. You can’t put all the blame on language L when L can describe other thing adequately.
That is vaguely phrased. Of course, one has to know the meaning og signal-states in some sense. However, it is not clear that every symbol must match up one-for-one with a sensory referent. Moreover, abstract terms seem to work differently to concrete ones.
It is only unsurprising if you have adopted a theory according to which someone would have to be acquainted by direct refrence with pentagons in order to understand the string “pentagon”. However, that is not the case.
Does the super-neuroscientists Mary understand dementia,psychosis, etc, in your opinion? Does she have experiences of excitation levels accross her synaptic clefts?
It’s begining to look like all male gynecologists should be sacked.
Again, qualia isn’t defined as “whatever is ineffable”, so the analogy isn’t analogous.
“That’s all very nice,” I say, “but you still haven’t explained fooglies.”
At this point, you are quite likely to think I am an idiot.
Do you? I think I was hacking that stuff when EY was in diapers. And you’re not using “quale” properly.
Please explain how that theory applies to mathematics.
I’ve heard it all before. Projects to Dissolve all Philosophical Problems have been tried in the past, with disappointing results.
So you say. That’s an unproven theory, for one thing. For another, there seem to be robust counterexamples, such as the ability of physicsts and mathematicians to communicate about unexperiencable higher dimensional spaces.
If they are at the bottom of the pyramid, they are special. You current agument, that what is at the bottom of the pyramid cannot be explained relies on that. And it amount to gainsaying the premise of Mary’s Room: Mary doens’t know everything about how the brain works, because he doesn’t know how qualia work,because no reductive explanation of qualia is available, because qualia cannot be reduced to simpler concepts because they are at the bottom of the pyramid.
That’s vaguely phrased. You have conceded it is special with regard to its place in the conceptual hierarchy and its communicabulity, for all that you are holding out that a metaphysical explanation isn’t required.
So: are attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials doomed?
And she’d have to have a stroke to understand the effects of stroke on the brain? You need to be clearer about the difference between grounding symbol systems,and finding referents for individual symbols.
You are taking it as a thought experiment where she succesfully learns colur qualia, although the expected outcome of the original story is that she doens’t.
I’ve conceded that they’re as special as birds that don’t fly. That is, that they’re things which don’t require any special explanation. One of the things you learn from computer programming is that recursion has to bottom out somewhere. To me, the idea that there are experiential primitives is no more surprising than the fact that computer languages have primitive operations: that’s what you make the non-primitives out of. No more surprising than the idea that at some point, we’ll stop discovering new levels of fundamental particles.
Among programmers, it can be a fun pastime to see just how few primitives you can have in a language, but evolution doesn’t have a brain that enjoys such games. So it’s unsurprising that evolution would work almost exclusively in the form of primitives—in other words, a very wide-bottomed pyramid.
Humans are the special ones—the only species that unquestionably uses recursive symbolic communication, and is therefore the only species that makes conceptual pyramids at all.
So, from my point of view, anything that’s not a primitive neural event is the thing that needs a special explanation!
You appear to be distorting my argument, by conflating experiential primitives and experiential grounding. Humans can communicate metaphorically, analogously, and in various other ways… but all of that communication takes place either in symbols (grounded in some prior experience), or through the direct analog means available to us (tone of voice, movement, drawing, facial expressions) to ground a communication in some actual, present-moment experience.
But, I expect you already knew that, which makes me think you’re simply trolling.
Why are you here, exactly?
Clearly, you’re not a Bayesian reductionist, nor do you appear to show any interest whatsoever in becoming one. In not one comment have I ever seen you learn something from your participation, nor do I see anything that suggests you have any interest in learning anything, or really doing anything else but generating a feeling of superiority through your ability to remain unconvinced of anything while putting on a show of your education.
Your language about arguments and concessions strongly suggest that you think this is a debating society, or that arguments are soldiers to be sent forth in support of a bottom line...
And I don’t think I’ve ever seen you ask a single question that wasn’t of the rhetorical, trying-to-score-points-off-your-opponent variety, which suggests you have very little interest in becoming… well, any less wrong than you currently are.
So, why are you here?
That’s vaguely phrased. What does “special” mean? Is my guess about metaphysical explanation correct.?
I know. I’m a programmer.
You appear to be not even responding to my arguments.
I am here to evaluate ideas and argumnents.
I have studied Bayesian reductionism and I find it flawed. I can explain why. Are you saying I should not be examining it critically, or that I should accept it in spite of its flaws?
What sort of effort would that involve? Do you realise how religious your language sounds—“you need to try harder to believe”?
Well, Sir, I haven’t seen you learn anything from me.
Most ideas are wrong, so I remain unconvinced by most of them.
What are these forums for if not for debate? Are participants supposed to accept things uncritically? That’s not rationallity where I come from.
Try considering the hypothesis that all that is true, and is explained by my already knowing how to be rational.
I mean, do you think LW has cornered some market in rationality? Do you think everyone who visits these boards can be assumed to be naively empty-headed? Do you think it might be a step forward to base your ad hominems on actual characteristics rather than assumed ones?
I’m the irritant that produces the pearl.
Way to conflate three entirely different things to suggest various deniable conclusions. A terrific example of the sort of “Dark Arts” debating tactics we are not interested in having on LessWrong.
I think perhaps you’re looking for the Argument Clinic, instead.
In other words, you admit to being a troll. Thanks for clarifying that.
Congratulations on at least not being an immediately obvious one; I originally mistook you for an educable single-topic visitor from another site (rather than a determined troll), who might actually be educable. So, I’ll stop replying entirely now.
This and your recent other discussions about qualia and zombies are a great example of getting useful explanations thanks to trolls. It finally clicked for me that an algorithmic explanation doesn’t actually “leave anything out” and that reductionism doesn’t fail. I kept reading “Mind Projection Fallacy”, but couldn’t see how I was committing it. Thanks for your efforts, PJ!
I’m glad someone got some use out of it.
You (or someone else) could have gotten just as good of an explanation out of me by saying, “I don’t understand how that’s committing the MPF”, so that’s not really evidence in favor of trolls being valuable.
What’s valuable is persistence, in that if you ask the question only once and stop saying, “yeah, but what I don’t get about that is...”, ” wouldn’t that then cause/mean...”, etc., until you get a satisfactory answer.
Trolls are certainly persistent, but that doesn’t mean the resulting conversation record will necessarily be of any use, alas.
Sure, in principle, but what really happened was that I read the first few explanations (mostly by Elizier and Dennett) and thought, “Nah, that doesn’t really work. How am I projecting anything? You are all ignoring consciousness!”. When others then mentioned the position, I automatically dismissed it. Only by seeing people stubbornly bring up really bad arguments against reductionism did I finally snap, “C’mon! I’m on your side, but that’s just stupid. If $belief about qualia were true, how would you ever know? What’s the different anticipation here? … Waitaminnit, what am I anticipating here?” and that unraveled the whole thing in the end.
(Noted, however. Need to ask more.)
Asking a number of separate questions is not conflation. If you are not going to answer questions, I can only draw whatever conclusions I can from your silence.
Are the LW forums for debate, or not?
Dropping out of a debate with questions unanswered and points unmet can make you look irrational—but of course you don’t have to engage with someone Innately Evill, do you?
Again. you have this absolutely rigid idea that I (? everybody?) can only possibly be a learner (agreer? disciple?) here, although you actually know nothing about me, and therefore have no idea what I might have to teach. But having labelled me Innately Evil, that’s never going to change. There is no fact of the matter that I am the learner and you the teacher; instead, just a bunch of stop signs in your mind.
You stopped making substantive replies some time ago. I suppose by “entirely” you will stop Ad Homming as well.
Outmoded method of production for object-type [pearl]. Slow, inefficient, no quality control. Pearl only has superficial value. Synthetic pearls significantly less valued than organic: no value to actual physical configuration. Value attached to status associated with expensive or difficult-to-produce item. Recommend elimination of object-type [pearl].
(You’re the irritant that produces something pjeby and I don’t want.)
Which would be understanding (=ability to explain) rather than unchallenged belief.
People who view themselves as annoying others because they make them think tend to be trolls. (Other types of trolls include people who consciously troll for lulz, and people who can’t stick to the local unwritten rules.)
I don’t actually know any example of people consciously thinking of themselves as a pearl-producing irritant who aren’t trolls. People who irritate other people and cause them to produce valuable thoughts tend to do most of the thinking themselves with pearls as a smaller side effect (controversial thinkers). The rest tend to be very poor thinkers whose arguments can be reconstructed by more skilled thinkers for interesting results (some theists; Marx), and they try not to be annoying.
To be entirely fair, I have actually known such a person. It manifested as him showing up at a meditation meetup I went to on a regular basis, sitting quietly, not speaking unless directly asked a question, being generally ineffable when asked questions, and quietly giving up when several months (a year?) of this behavior didn’t get the result he was looking for. I wouldn’t even have known why he left if I hadn’t tracked him down and asked.
Quite fair. If non-troll irritants are usually this unintrusive, there’s a selection bias in my known examples.
Did he tell you what result he wanted? FWIW, I would have done what I do when communication norms break down: sit next to him, watch him, mirror him. (Learning his communication style, testing whether he’s trying to teach by example, taming an animal.) Or maybe done what I do when I want to meet someone but am afraid: watch from afar, never dare approach.
It’s not really relevant here, but he was looking to push the group toward Advaita Vedanta.
This is basically what he was aiming for, but what he was trying to teach was too subtle to really come across in a situation with as many distractions as that one had (it was a rather unusual mediation group) and also the details of his ineffability raised enough warning flags that he had trouble getting people to take him seriously.
He has a blog here if you’re interested, but I should note that its topic and mode of discussion is a potential memetic hazard, along the lines of nihilism but likely harder to recover from.
I wish. Making someone think is almost impossible.
If you set out to make people think, yeah. You just end up being a gadfly.
If you set out to produce high-quality thoughts because you need them for something else, you’ll make people think. Of course they’ll already be thinkers (but you’re posting on LW).
High quality thoughts have to be able to answer objections. That’s why there is a comment section underneath each post. That is why lecturers call for questions after they have finished. etc etc.
No, which would be hard-fought for beliefs, not correct beliefs.
There’s no reason they can’ be both. Of course what we ultimately want is truth.Mysticism says you can grasp the truth about everything in a flash. According to non-mystical epistemology, it’s a question of tentatively building theories and revising or abandoning them if they go wrong. Justification and corroboration are our proxies for truth.
There’s an obvious joke just screaming to be made here.