There may be some things in common between what I describe and the “Mary’s room” experiment, but I’m certainly not recreating it—my position is pretty much the opposite of Jackson’s.
I agree that your and my experience of colour are probably importantly different from those of some tetrachromats. (How different depends on how far their 4th cone’s peak is from the others.) For that matter, different trichromats have cone response functions that aren’t quite the same, so even two people with “normal” colour vision don’t have the exact same colour qualia. In fact, they wouldn’t have even without that difference, because their past experiences and general psychological makeup aren’t identical. I don’t see why any of this tells us anything at all about whether qualia are physical or not, though.
I don’t understand how your “corresponding table” is an “ugly construction”. I mean, if for some reason you actually had to write down such a table then no doubt it would be ugly, but the same is true for all sorts of things we can all agree are real. Is there something about it that you think is a reason not to believe in physicalism?
I don’t think Eliezer was exactly trying to prove that zombies are impossible. He was trying to knock down an argument (based on the idea that obviously you can imagine a world just like this one but where the people are zombies) for zombies being possible, and to offer a better set of intuitions suggesting that they probably aren’t. And it doesn’t seem to me that replacing zombies with inverted qualia in any way refutes Eliezer’s argument because (1) his argument was about zombies, not about inverted qualia and (2) for the reasons I’ve already given above, I think a very similar argument does in fact apply to inverted qualia. It’s not as clear-cut as for zombies, but it seems very convincing to me.
It seems i start to understand where is the difference between our positions.
Qualia are not about cones in the eye. Because I could see colour dreams. So qualia are somewhere in the brains.
You said: “For that matter, different trichromats have cone response functions that aren’t quite the same, so even two people with “normal” colour vision don’t have the exact same colour qualia.”
(I could also see visual images if I press finger on my eye.)
So the brain use qualia to represent colours in outside world, but qualia are not actual colours.
So qualia themselves are like variables in equation. M represent mass, and F presents force in second law of Newton.
F=Ma.
But “M” is not mass, and “F” is not force, they is just variables. And if we say that now “M” is force, and “F” is mass, we will have the same equation. (It is like an experiment with inverted spectrum, btw)
M=Fa
So, qualia are variables which the brain use to denote external experiences. The same way “F” is letter from latin alphabet, which we use to denote force. The latin alphabet is completely different entity than physical forces. And when we discuss “F” we should always remember what we a speaking about—latin alphabet or force.
EDITED:
If we continue this analogy, we could imagine a computer which calculate force. It could tell us everything about results of calculations, but it can’t tell which variables it uses in its internal process.
What we conclude from here:
It could be infinitely many different variables which the computer could use. They could be inverted.
But it has to use some kind of variables, so it can’t be a zombie. Bingo! We just got new argument against p-zombie.
(The longer version of this new anti p-zombie argument is the following: thinking is impossible without variables and variables must be qualia, because the nature of qualia is that they are simple, different and unbreakable in parts, that is why I also called them “atoms of experience”—but it may need longer elaboration as it is very sketchy)
The programer of the computer chose which variables to use in this particular computer. So he created the table of correspondence in which he stated: “F is force, and M is mass”.
But qualia (at least colour qualia) are often caused by what happens to cones in the eye, and the nature of your colour qualia (even ones that occur in dreams) will depend on how your visual system is wired up, which in turn will depend on the cones in your eyes.
qualia are not actual colours
Of course not. That would be a category error. Qualia are what happens in our brains (or our immaterial souls, or wherever we have experiences) in response to external stimulation, or similar things that arise in other ways (e.g., in dreams).
qualia are variables which the brain uses to denote external experiences
This seems like a dangerous metaphor, because the brain presumably uses kinda-variable-like things at different levels, some of which have no direct connection to experience.
They could be inverted
I think how plausible this is depends on what sort of variables you’re thinking of, and is markedly less plausible for the sorts of variables that could actually correspond to qualia.
I mean, you can imagine (lots of oversimplification going on here, but never mind) taking some single neuron and inverting what happens at all its synapses, so that the activation of that neuron has the exact opposite meaning to what it used to be but everything else in the brain carries on just as before. That would be an inversion, of course. But it would be the exact opposite of what’s supposed to happen in the “inverted spectrum” thought experiment. There, you have the same physical substrate somehow producing opposite experiences; but here we have the same experiences with part of the physical substrate inverted.
But a single neuron’s internal state is not in any way a plausible candidate for what a quale could be. Qualia have to be things we are consciously aware of, and we are not consciously aware of the internal states of our neurons any more than a chess program is making plans by predicting the voltages in its DRAM cells.
There may be some things in common between what I describe and the “Mary’s room” experiment, but I’m certainly not recreating it—my position is pretty much the opposite of Jackson’s.
I agree that your and my experience of colour are probably importantly different from those of some tetrachromats. (How different depends on how far their 4th cone’s peak is from the others.) For that matter, different trichromats have cone response functions that aren’t quite the same, so even two people with “normal” colour vision don’t have the exact same colour qualia. In fact, they wouldn’t have even without that difference, because their past experiences and general psychological makeup aren’t identical. I don’t see why any of this tells us anything at all about whether qualia are physical or not, though.
I don’t understand how your “corresponding table” is an “ugly construction”. I mean, if for some reason you actually had to write down such a table then no doubt it would be ugly, but the same is true for all sorts of things we can all agree are real. Is there something about it that you think is a reason not to believe in physicalism?
I don’t think Eliezer was exactly trying to prove that zombies are impossible. He was trying to knock down an argument (based on the idea that obviously you can imagine a world just like this one but where the people are zombies) for zombies being possible, and to offer a better set of intuitions suggesting that they probably aren’t. And it doesn’t seem to me that replacing zombies with inverted qualia in any way refutes Eliezer’s argument because (1) his argument was about zombies, not about inverted qualia and (2) for the reasons I’ve already given above, I think a very similar argument does in fact apply to inverted qualia. It’s not as clear-cut as for zombies, but it seems very convincing to me.
It seems i start to understand where is the difference between our positions.
Qualia are not about cones in the eye. Because I could see colour dreams. So qualia are somewhere in the brains.
You said: “For that matter, different trichromats have cone response functions that aren’t quite the same, so even two people with “normal” colour vision don’t have the exact same colour qualia.”
(I could also see visual images if I press finger on my eye.)
So the brain use qualia to represent colours in outside world, but qualia are not actual colours.
So qualia themselves are like variables in equation. M represent mass, and F presents force in second law of Newton.
F=Ma.
But “M” is not mass, and “F” is not force, they is just variables. And if we say that now “M” is force, and “F” is mass, we will have the same equation. (It is like an experiment with inverted spectrum, btw)
M=Fa
So, qualia are variables which the brain use to denote external experiences. The same way “F” is letter from latin alphabet, which we use to denote force. The latin alphabet is completely different entity than physical forces. And when we discuss “F” we should always remember what we a speaking about—latin alphabet or force.
EDITED: If we continue this analogy, we could imagine a computer which calculate force. It could tell us everything about results of calculations, but it can’t tell which variables it uses in its internal process.
What we conclude from here:
It could be infinitely many different variables which the computer could use. They could be inverted.
But it has to use some kind of variables, so it can’t be a zombie. Bingo! We just got new argument against p-zombie.
(The longer version of this new anti p-zombie argument is the following: thinking is impossible without variables and variables must be qualia, because the nature of qualia is that they are simple, different and unbreakable in parts, that is why I also called them “atoms of experience”—but it may need longer elaboration as it is very sketchy)
The programer of the computer chose which variables to use in this particular computer. So he created the table of correspondence in which he stated: “F is force, and M is mass”.
But qualia (at least colour qualia) are often caused by what happens to cones in the eye, and the nature of your colour qualia (even ones that occur in dreams) will depend on how your visual system is wired up, which in turn will depend on the cones in your eyes.
Of course not. That would be a category error. Qualia are what happens in our brains (or our immaterial souls, or wherever we have experiences) in response to external stimulation, or similar things that arise in other ways (e.g., in dreams).
This seems like a dangerous metaphor, because the brain presumably uses kinda-variable-like things at different levels, some of which have no direct connection to experience.
I think how plausible this is depends on what sort of variables you’re thinking of, and is markedly less plausible for the sorts of variables that could actually correspond to qualia.
I mean, you can imagine (lots of oversimplification going on here, but never mind) taking some single neuron and inverting what happens at all its synapses, so that the activation of that neuron has the exact opposite meaning to what it used to be but everything else in the brain carries on just as before. That would be an inversion, of course. But it would be the exact opposite of what’s supposed to happen in the “inverted spectrum” thought experiment. There, you have the same physical substrate somehow producing opposite experiences; but here we have the same experiences with part of the physical substrate inverted.
But a single neuron’s internal state is not in any way a plausible candidate for what a quale could be. Qualia have to be things we are consciously aware of, and we are not consciously aware of the internal states of our neurons any more than a chess program is making plans by predicting the voltages in its DRAM cells.