This isn’t a meaningful question because the only thing that determines a quale as being a “quale of redness” is that it accompanies a perception of something red.
Edit: It’s a meaningful question because we, as far as we are concerned, it could have been different because we don’t have a way of predicting it. Moreover, iyt quite possibly does vary between individuals, because red-green colour blindness is a thing.
What determines, in the sense of pinning down, a quale is a combination of the external stimulus, eg. 600nm light, and the subject.
But that isn’t the relevant sense of “determines”. It isn’t causal deterinism, and it isn’t the kind of “vertical” determinism that arises from having a reductive explanation. If subjective red is an entirely physical phenomenon, then it should be determined by, and predictable from, the underlying physics. This we cannot do—we cannot predict non human qualia, or novel human qualia. If there is a set of facts that cannot be deduced from physics, physicalism is wrong.
Reductionism allows some basic facts, about fundamental laws and primitive entities to go unreduced, but not high level phenomena, which includes consciousness.
HPoC is demanding a justification of experience from within a world in which everything is just experiences.
No, it demands a justification of experience on the basis of a physical world, if you assume you are in one. There is no HP in an Idealist ontology, because there is no longer a need to explain one thing on terms of another. It’s unlikely that Seth is an idealist.
The success of science in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has led many philosophers to adopt a physicalist ontology, basically the idea that the fundamental constituents of reality are what physics says they are. (It is a background assumption of physicalism that the sciences form a sort of tower, with psychology and sociology near the top, and biology and chemistry in the middle , and with physics at the bottom.
The higher and intermediate layers don’t have their own ontologies—mind-stuff and elan vital are outdated concepts—everything is either a fundamental particle, or an arrangement of fundamental particles)
So the problem of mind is now the problem of qualia, and the way philosophers want to explain it is physicalisticaly. However, the problem of explaining how brains give rise to subjective sensation, of explaining qualia in physical terms, is now considered to be The Hard Problem. In the words of David Chalmers:-
″ It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”
What is hard about the hard problem is the requirement to explain consciousness, particularly conscious experience, in terms of a physical ontology. Its the combination of the two that makes it hard. Which is to say that the problem can be sidestepped by either denying consciousness, or adopting a non-physicalist ontology.
Examples of non-physical ontologies include dualism, panpsychism and idealism . These are not faced with the Hard Problem, as such, because they are able to say that subjective, qualia, just are what they are, without facing any need to offer a reductive explanation of them. But they have problems of their own, mainly that physicalism is so successful in other areas.
Eliminative materialism and illusionism, on the other hand, deny that there is anything to be explained, thereby implying there is no problem, But these approaches also remain unsatisfactory because of the compelling subjective evidence for consciousness.
So you can sidestep the Hard Problemn by debying that there ius anything to be explained, or by denying that conscious experience neeeds to be explained in physical terms.
The third approach to the Hard Problem is to answer it in its own terms.
Edit: It’s a meaningful question because we, as far as we are concerned, it could have been different because we don’t have a way of predicting it. Moreover, iyt quite possibly does vary between individuals, because red-green colour blindness is a thing. What determines, in the sense of pinning down, a quale is a combination of the external stimulus, eg. 600nm light, and the subject.
But that isn’t the relevant sense of “determines”. It isn’t causal deterinism, and it isn’t the kind of “vertical” determinism that arises from having a reductive explanation. If subjective red is an entirely physical phenomenon, then it should be determined by, and predictable from, the underlying physics. This we cannot do—we cannot predict non human qualia, or novel human qualia. If there is a set of facts that cannot be deduced from physics, physicalism is wrong.
Reductionism allows some basic facts, about fundamental laws and primitive entities to go unreduced, but not high level phenomena, which includes consciousness.
No, it demands a justification of experience on the basis of a physical world, if you assume you are in one. There is no HP in an Idealist ontology, because there is no longer a need to explain one thing on terms of another. It’s unlikely that Seth is an idealist.
The success of science in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has led many philosophers to adopt a physicalist ontology, basically the idea that the fundamental constituents of reality are what physics says they are. (It is a background assumption of physicalism that the sciences form a sort of tower, with psychology and sociology near the top, and biology and chemistry in the middle , and with physics at the bottom. The higher and intermediate layers don’t have their own ontologies—mind-stuff and elan vital are outdated concepts—everything is either a fundamental particle, or an arrangement of fundamental particles)
So the problem of mind is now the problem of qualia, and the way philosophers want to explain it is physicalisticaly. However, the problem of explaining how brains give rise to subjective sensation, of explaining qualia in physical terms, is now considered to be The Hard Problem. In the words of David Chalmers:-
″ It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”
What is hard about the hard problem is the requirement to explain consciousness, particularly conscious experience, in terms of a physical ontology. Its the combination of the two that makes it hard. Which is to say that the problem can be sidestepped by either denying consciousness, or adopting a non-physicalist ontology.
Examples of non-physical ontologies include dualism, panpsychism and idealism . These are not faced with the Hard Problem, as such, because they are able to say that subjective, qualia, just are what they are, without facing any need to offer a reductive explanation of them. But they have problems of their own, mainly that physicalism is so successful in other areas.
Eliminative materialism and illusionism, on the other hand, deny that there is anything to be explained, thereby implying there is no problem, But these approaches also remain unsatisfactory because of the compelling subjective evidence for consciousness.
So you can sidestep the Hard Problemn by debying that there ius anything to be explained, or by denying that conscious experience neeeds to be explained in physical terms.
The third approach to the Hard Problem is to answer it in its own terms.