The problem is that most philosophers who care about phenomenology at all would assign at least some ontologically foundational status to subjective experience, simply because it is foundational enough to you and anyone else with subjective experience.
Unfortunately, this is close to nonsense. Just because something strikes me as foundational to me doesn’t give me any decent reason for thinking it has any such actually foundational status. Humans suck as introspection. We really, really suck at intuiting out the differences in how we process things unless things are going drastically wrong. For example, it isn’t obvious to most humans that we use different sections of our brains to add and multiply. But, there’s a lot of evidence for this. For example, fMRI scans show different areas lighting up, with areas corresponding to memory lighting up for multiplication and areas corresponding to reasoning lighting up for addition. Similarly, there are stroke victims who only lose the ability to do one or the other operation. And this is but one example of how humans fail. Relying on human feelings to get an idea about how anything in the world, especially our own mind, works is not a good idea.
It does mean that Occam’s razor should apply to “the way it feels from the inside”, which tends to weigh against complex explanations like “configurations of neurons” and in favor of either exotic physics or a spooky superintelligence who can figure out how to run debugger sessions on our physical brains.
I don’t follow this logic at all. I’m not completely sure what you are trying to do here but it sounds suspiciously like the theistic argument that God is a simple hypothesis. Just because I can posit something as a single, irreducible entity does not make that thing simple. (Also, can you expand on what you mean by a spooky superintelligence running debugging sessions since I can’t parse this is in any coherent way)
Unfortunately, this is close to nonsense. Just because something strikes me as foundational to me doesn’t give me any decent reason for thinking it has any such actually foundational status.
Small nitpick: I am not talking about what is foundational to the way our world works. I am only making the fairly trite obsevation that subjective experience/qualia is the only thing we can directly experience; it would be really, really strange if something so basic to us turned out to be dependent on complicated configurations of neurons and glial cells, as naive physicalists suggest.
Humans suck as introspection. We really, really suck at intuiting out the differences in how we process things unless things are going drastically wrong. For example, it isn’t obvious to most humans that we use different sections of our brains to add and multiply.
What this is actually saying is that phenomenology (the stuff we can access by introspection) cannot directly map physical areas of the brain of the kind which might get damaged in a stroke. In itself, this is not evidence that humans “suck” at introspection; especially if our consciousness really is a quantum state with $bignum degrees of freedom, rather than a classical system with spatially separate subparts.
it sounds suspiciously like the theistic argument that God is a simple hypothesis.
God is not a simple hypothesis, but “this was affected by an optimization process which cares about X or something like it” is simpler than “this configuration which happens to be near-optimal for X arose by sheer luck”. Which is pretty much what one would have to posit in order to explain our subjective experience of the extremely complicated physical systems we call “brains”. There are other avenues such as the anthropic principle, but ISTM that at some point one would start to run into circularities.
it would be really, really strange if something so basic to us turned out to be dependent on complicated configurations of neurons and glial cells, as naive physicalists suggest.
What else can it depend on? Your original claim was that it has to do something with quantum superpositions, so can you tell, how these superpositions are going to explain qualia any better? Seems like you demand the explanation be black box without internal structure; this is contrary to what actual explanations are.
this configuration which happens to be near-optimal for X arose by sheer luck
The “naive physicalists” don’t maintain anything like that. Evolution isn’t sheer luck.
so can you tell, how these superpositions are going to explain qualia any better? Seems like you demand the explanation be black box without internal structure
I’m not trying to explain why qualia occur, just seeking a sensible physical description of them. Given the requirement that qualia should be actually experienced in some sense, a “black box” system which clearly matches these mysterious experiences is better than a complicated classical configuration plus a lengthy description of how this configuration is felt from the inside.
The “naive physicalists” don’t maintain anything like that. Evolution isn’t sheer luck.
Indeed it’s not: it’s an optimization process! But why would evolution care about qualia? In fact, many physicalist philosophers think qualia exist as epiphenomena, and an epiphenomenon cannot be naturally selected for.
I’m not trying to explain why qualia occur, just seeking a sensible physical description of them.
I use description and explanation as synonyms most of the time. Black box description is not much of a description, it’s rather lack of one. What information is contained in “qualia work like a black box”, or in a little more fancy language, “qualia work due to still unknown physical mechanism”? These are not description of qualia; the only non-vacuous interpretation of such sentences is “the contemporary physics is not going to explain qualia”, which may be true, but still is a statement about our current knowledge, not about qualia.
But why would evolution care about qualia?
Well, you are probably right in that, even if we are getting dangerously close to the philosophical zombies’ realm.
What information is contained in “qualia work like a black box”, or in a little more fancy language, “qualia work due to still unknown physical mechanism”?
Very little, but this is not a real description of qualia, just a sketch proposal which demonstrates a promising avenue of research. A complete description would state what physical system in the brain is responsible for maintaining complex, “black box” quantum states, and perhaps how that physical system interacts with known neural correlates of subjective experiences. Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near that level yet.
even if we are getting dangerously close to the philosophical zombies’ realm.
Dangerously close? Do you fear that P-zombies will infect you with an epiphenomenal virus and cause you to lose your subjective experience?
[J]ust a sketch proposal which demonstrates a promising avenue of research. A complete description would state what physical system in the brain is responsible for maintaining complex, “black box” quantum states [...]
What makes this avenue different from investigation of neuron configurations? New physical laws were never discovered after rejecting the old ones, saying that they couldn’t possibly work. All discoveries of new physics happened after conducting research using the old paradigm and realising anomalies. I mean, if there is something strangely quantum going on in the brains, we will not miss it even if we use the conventional approach.
Or said differently, I still have no idea what light quantumness can bring into the question.
Do you fear that P-zombies will infect you with an epiphenomenal virus and cause you to lose your subjective experience?
I fear talking about things that aren’t connected to observable facts. I fear that I might say a lot of grammatically correct sentences with no actual meaning.
What makes this avenue different from investigation of neuron configurations?
Not much. It’s still neuroscience, but it takes reports of subjective experience a bit more seriously, and tries to explain them by using existing physics, rather than treating them as meaningless or as magical and unexplainable.
I fear talking about thing that aren’t connected to observable facts. I fear that I might say a lot of grammatically correct sentences with no actual meaning.
Look, it’s not that complicated. I’m not the only person who talks about the Cartesian theater and claims that we can somehow feel brain algorithms from the inside. If subjective experience is not an observable fact to you, then your psychology is radically different from that of many other people.
I should have written objective observable facts or something like that. I can observe that I am not a P-zombie, however the beauty of the whole P-zombie business is that such observation is, sort of, insufficient. I would need to observe whether you are a P-zombie, and that I can’t.
It is perhaps more economical and Occam-razorish for me to expect that other people are no P-zombies either, but even if they were zombies, I would have no way to realise that, and this renders the zombie question quite uninteresting.
Small nitpick: I am not talking about what is foundational to the way our world works. I am only making the fairly trite obsevation that subjective experience/qualia is the only thing we can directly experience; it would be really, really strange if something so basic to us turned out to be dependent on complicated configurations of neurons and glial cells, as naive physicalists suggest.
Do you question the consensus that you see using your eyes? Because the eye is a blatantly complicated mechanism directly in the middle of one of the direct experiences of the world you stake your theory on.
I’m not questioning the fact that complicated mechanisms are involved in creating your subjective experience; I question the physical description of that subjective experience as an incredibly complicated configuration in the brain. If your qualia are at all real in some sense, they should correspond to something far simpler than that on Occam’s Razor grounds. Alternately, you might just be a P-zombie. But then you’d have serious problems experiencing how your brain feels from the inside, although your brain would definitely be talking about its internal experiences.
I’m not questioning the fact that complicated mechanisms are involved in creating your subjective experience;
Why aren’t you? You just said that “[qualia] should correspond to something far simpler than that”. If a (say) visual quale is simple, then why does the human system need a complicated mechanism to capture large numbers of photons such that they form a coherent image on a surface coated with photosensitive neurons, which are wired so as to cause large-scale effects on other parts of the neural (and glial) system of the brain, starting with the visual cortex and spreading from there … to cause something simple? Light was simple to start with! If you expect things to be simple at the Cartesian theater, the visual system moves the wrong way.
Light is simple, but evolved organisms care very little about the fundamental qualities of light. They care a lot about running efficient computations using various inputs, including the excitation of photosensitive neurons. This is probably why the Cartesian theather feels very much like computation on high-level inputs and outputs, rather than objectively fundamental things such as wavelengths of light. And the computations which transform low-level data like excitation of sensory neurons into high-level inputs are probably unconscious because they are qualitatively different from conscious computation.
I would expect optimization for efficiency to be something evolution does—but I am compelled to note that I mentioned “the Cartesian theater” as a reference to Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, where he strenuously refuted the idea of the Cartesian theater. By Dennett’s argument—and even when Consciousness Explained came out, he had a lot of research data to work from—the collocation of all sensory data in a single channel to run past some homunculus recording our conscious experience is unlikely. After all, there already is a data-processing entity right there to collect all the sensory data—that’s the entire brain. So within the brain, it should not be surprising that different conscious experiences are saved to memory from different parts. Particularly since the brain is patently a parallel computer anyway.
Daniel Dennett’s “refutation” of the Cartesian theater has been widely criticized. Basically, he relies on perceptual illusions such as discrete motion being perceived as continuous, arguing that there should be a fact of the matter as to whether “the motion in the Cartesian theater” is continuous or not. But phenomenology is far simpler (or more complicated) than that: the fact that we perceive the quale of continuous_motion does not imply that a homunculous somewhere is seeing the object in an intermediate position at each given moment in time. It is a strawman argument.
Unfortunately, this is close to nonsense. Just because something strikes me as foundational to me doesn’t give me any decent reason for thinking it has any such actually foundational status. Humans suck as introspection. We really, really suck at intuiting out the differences in how we process things unless things are going drastically wrong. For example, it isn’t obvious to most humans that we use different sections of our brains to add and multiply. But, there’s a lot of evidence for this. For example, fMRI scans show different areas lighting up, with areas corresponding to memory lighting up for multiplication and areas corresponding to reasoning lighting up for addition. Similarly, there are stroke victims who only lose the ability to do one or the other operation. And this is but one example of how humans fail. Relying on human feelings to get an idea about how anything in the world, especially our own mind, works is not a good idea.
I don’t follow this logic at all. I’m not completely sure what you are trying to do here but it sounds suspiciously like the theistic argument that God is a simple hypothesis. Just because I can posit something as a single, irreducible entity does not make that thing simple. (Also, can you expand on what you mean by a spooky superintelligence running debugging sessions since I can’t parse this is in any coherent way)
Small nitpick: I am not talking about what is foundational to the way our world works. I am only making the fairly trite obsevation that subjective experience/qualia is the only thing we can directly experience; it would be really, really strange if something so basic to us turned out to be dependent on complicated configurations of neurons and glial cells, as naive physicalists suggest.
What this is actually saying is that phenomenology (the stuff we can access by introspection) cannot directly map physical areas of the brain of the kind which might get damaged in a stroke. In itself, this is not evidence that humans “suck” at introspection; especially if our consciousness really is a quantum state with $bignum degrees of freedom, rather than a classical system with spatially separate subparts.
God is not a simple hypothesis, but “this was affected by an optimization process which cares about X or something like it” is simpler than “this configuration which happens to be near-optimal for X arose by sheer luck”. Which is pretty much what one would have to posit in order to explain our subjective experience of the extremely complicated physical systems we call “brains”. There are other avenues such as the anthropic principle, but ISTM that at some point one would start to run into circularities.
What else can it depend on? Your original claim was that it has to do something with quantum superpositions, so can you tell, how these superpositions are going to explain qualia any better? Seems like you demand the explanation be black box without internal structure; this is contrary to what actual explanations are.
The “naive physicalists” don’t maintain anything like that. Evolution isn’t sheer luck.
I’m not trying to explain why qualia occur, just seeking a sensible physical description of them. Given the requirement that qualia should be actually experienced in some sense, a “black box” system which clearly matches these mysterious experiences is better than a complicated classical configuration plus a lengthy description of how this configuration is felt from the inside.
Indeed it’s not: it’s an optimization process! But why would evolution care about qualia? In fact, many physicalist philosophers think qualia exist as epiphenomena, and an epiphenomenon cannot be naturally selected for.
I use description and explanation as synonyms most of the time. Black box description is not much of a description, it’s rather lack of one. What information is contained in “qualia work like a black box”, or in a little more fancy language, “qualia work due to still unknown physical mechanism”? These are not description of qualia; the only non-vacuous interpretation of such sentences is “the contemporary physics is not going to explain qualia”, which may be true, but still is a statement about our current knowledge, not about qualia.
Well, you are probably right in that, even if we are getting dangerously close to the philosophical zombies’ realm.
Very little, but this is not a real description of qualia, just a sketch proposal which demonstrates a promising avenue of research. A complete description would state what physical system in the brain is responsible for maintaining complex, “black box” quantum states, and perhaps how that physical system interacts with known neural correlates of subjective experiences. Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near that level yet.
Dangerously close? Do you fear that P-zombies will infect you with an epiphenomenal virus and cause you to lose your subjective experience?
What makes this avenue different from investigation of neuron configurations? New physical laws were never discovered after rejecting the old ones, saying that they couldn’t possibly work. All discoveries of new physics happened after conducting research using the old paradigm and realising anomalies. I mean, if there is something strangely quantum going on in the brains, we will not miss it even if we use the conventional approach.
Or said differently, I still have no idea what light quantumness can bring into the question.
I fear talking about things that aren’t connected to observable facts. I fear that I might say a lot of grammatically correct sentences with no actual meaning.
Not much. It’s still neuroscience, but it takes reports of subjective experience a bit more seriously, and tries to explain them by using existing physics, rather than treating them as meaningless or as magical and unexplainable.
Look, it’s not that complicated. I’m not the only person who talks about the Cartesian theater and claims that we can somehow feel brain algorithms from the inside. If subjective experience is not an observable fact to you, then your psychology is radically different from that of many other people.
I should have written objective observable facts or something like that. I can observe that I am not a P-zombie, however the beauty of the whole P-zombie business is that such observation is, sort of, insufficient. I would need to observe whether you are a P-zombie, and that I can’t.
It is perhaps more economical and Occam-razorish for me to expect that other people are no P-zombies either, but even if they were zombies, I would have no way to realise that, and this renders the zombie question quite uninteresting.
Do you question the consensus that you see using your eyes? Because the eye is a blatantly complicated mechanism directly in the middle of one of the direct experiences of the world you stake your theory on.
I’m not questioning the fact that complicated mechanisms are involved in creating your subjective experience; I question the physical description of that subjective experience as an incredibly complicated configuration in the brain. If your qualia are at all real in some sense, they should correspond to something far simpler than that on Occam’s Razor grounds. Alternately, you might just be a P-zombie. But then you’d have serious problems experiencing how your brain feels from the inside, although your brain would definitely be talking about its internal experiences.
Why aren’t you? You just said that “[qualia] should correspond to something far simpler than that”. If a (say) visual quale is simple, then why does the human system need a complicated mechanism to capture large numbers of photons such that they form a coherent image on a surface coated with photosensitive neurons, which are wired so as to cause large-scale effects on other parts of the neural (and glial) system of the brain, starting with the visual cortex and spreading from there … to cause something simple? Light was simple to start with! If you expect things to be simple at the Cartesian theater, the visual system moves the wrong way.
Light is simple, but evolved organisms care very little about the fundamental qualities of light. They care a lot about running efficient computations using various inputs, including the excitation of photosensitive neurons. This is probably why the Cartesian theather feels very much like computation on high-level inputs and outputs, rather than objectively fundamental things such as wavelengths of light. And the computations which transform low-level data like excitation of sensory neurons into high-level inputs are probably unconscious because they are qualitatively different from conscious computation.
I would expect optimization for efficiency to be something evolution does—but I am compelled to note that I mentioned “the Cartesian theater” as a reference to Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, where he strenuously refuted the idea of the Cartesian theater. By Dennett’s argument—and even when Consciousness Explained came out, he had a lot of research data to work from—the collocation of all sensory data in a single channel to run past some homunculus recording our conscious experience is unlikely. After all, there already is a data-processing entity right there to collect all the sensory data—that’s the entire brain. So within the brain, it should not be surprising that different conscious experiences are saved to memory from different parts. Particularly since the brain is patently a parallel computer anyway.
Daniel Dennett’s “refutation” of the Cartesian theater has been widely criticized. Basically, he relies on perceptual illusions such as discrete motion being perceived as continuous, arguing that there should be a fact of the matter as to whether “the motion in the Cartesian theater” is continuous or not. But phenomenology is far simpler (or more complicated) than that: the fact that we perceive the quale of continuous_motion does not imply that a homunculous somewhere is seeing the object in an intermediate position at each given moment in time. It is a strawman argument.
Before I respond: are we actually getting anywhere in this discussion? I have this sinking feeling that I’m asking the wrong questions.