Those analogies don’t hold, because you’re describing claims I might make about the world outside of my subjective experience (‘ghosts are real’, ‘gravity waves are carried by angels’, etc.).
The analogies do hold, because you don’t get to do special pleading and claim ultimate authority about what’s real inside your subjective experience any more than about what’s real outside of it. Your subjective experience is part of our shared reality, just like mine.
People are mistaken all the time about what goes on inside their mind, about the validity of their memories, or about the real reasons behind their actions. So why should I take at face value your claims about the validity of your thoughts, especially when those thoughts lead to logical contradictions?
I think we’re mostly talking past each other, but I would of course agree that if my position contains or implies logical contradictions then that’s a problem. Which of my thoughts lead to which logical contradictions?
Let’s say the Hard Problem is real. That means solutions to the Easy Problem are insufficient, i.e., the usual physical explanations.
But when we speak about physics, we’re really talking about making predictions based on regularities in observations in general. Some observations we could explain by positing the force of gravity. Newton himself was not satisfied with this, because how does gravity “know” to pull on objects? Yet we were able to make very successful predictions about the motions of the planets and of objects on the surface of the Earth, so we considered those things “explained” by Newton’s theory of gravity. But then we noticed a slight discrepancy between some of these predictions and our observations, so Einstein came up with General Relativity to correct those predictions and now we consider these discrepancies “explained”, even though the reason why that particular theory works remains mysterious, e.g., why does spacetime exist? In general, when a hypothesis correctly predicts observations, we consider these observations scientifically explained.
Therefore to say that solutions to the Easy Problem are insufficient to explain qualia indicates (at least to me) one of two things.
Qualia have no regularity that we can observe. If they really didn’t have regularities that we could observe, we wouldn’t be able to observe that they exist, which contradicts the claim that they do exist. However, they do have regularities! We can predict qualia! Which means solutions to the Easy Problem are sufficient after all, which contradicts the assumption that they’re insufficient.
We’re aspiring to a kind of explanation for qualia over and above the scientific one, i.e., just predicting is not enough. You could posit any additional requirements for an explanation to qualify, but presumably we want an explanation to be true. You can’t know beforehand what’s true, so you can’t know that such additional requirements don’t disqualify the truth. There is only one thing that we know will be true however, namely that whatever we will observe in the future is what we will observe in the future. Therefore as long as the predictions of a theory don’t deviate from future observations, we can’t rule out that it’s accurately describing what’s actually going on, i.e., we can’t falsify it. In a way it’s a low bar, but it’s the best we can do. However, if a hypothesis makes predictions that are compatible with any and all observations, i.e., it’s unfalsifiable, then we can’t ever gain any information about its validity from any observations even in principle, which directly contradicts the assumption that you can find an explanation.
The analogies do hold, because you don’t get to do special pleading and claim ultimate authority about what’s real inside your subjective experience any more than about what’s real outside of it. Your subjective experience is part of our shared reality, just like mine.
People are mistaken all the time about what goes on inside their mind, about the validity of their memories, or about the real reasons behind their actions. So why should I take at face value your claims about the validity of your thoughts, especially when those thoughts lead to logical contradictions?
I think we’re mostly talking past each other, but I would of course agree that if my position contains or implies logical contradictions then that’s a problem. Which of my thoughts lead to which logical contradictions?
Let’s say the Hard Problem is real. That means solutions to the Easy Problem are insufficient, i.e., the usual physical explanations.
But when we speak about physics, we’re really talking about making predictions based on regularities in observations in general. Some observations we could explain by positing the force of gravity. Newton himself was not satisfied with this, because how does gravity “know” to pull on objects? Yet we were able to make very successful predictions about the motions of the planets and of objects on the surface of the Earth, so we considered those things “explained” by Newton’s theory of gravity. But then we noticed a slight discrepancy between some of these predictions and our observations, so Einstein came up with General Relativity to correct those predictions and now we consider these discrepancies “explained”, even though the reason why that particular theory works remains mysterious, e.g., why does spacetime exist? In general, when a hypothesis correctly predicts observations, we consider these observations scientifically explained.
Therefore to say that solutions to the Easy Problem are insufficient to explain qualia indicates (at least to me) one of two things.
Qualia have no regularity that we can observe. If they really didn’t have regularities that we could observe, we wouldn’t be able to observe that they exist, which contradicts the claim that they do exist. However, they do have regularities! We can predict qualia! Which means solutions to the Easy Problem are sufficient after all, which contradicts the assumption that they’re insufficient.
We’re aspiring to a kind of explanation for qualia over and above the scientific one, i.e., just predicting is not enough. You could posit any additional requirements for an explanation to qualify, but presumably we want an explanation to be true. You can’t know beforehand what’s true, so you can’t know that such additional requirements don’t disqualify the truth. There is only one thing that we know will be true however, namely that whatever we will observe in the future is what we will observe in the future. Therefore as long as the predictions of a theory don’t deviate from future observations, we can’t rule out that it’s accurately describing what’s actually going on, i.e., we can’t falsify it. In a way it’s a low bar, but it’s the best we can do. However, if a hypothesis makes predictions that are compatible with any and all observations, i.e., it’s unfalsifiable, then we can’t ever gain any information about its validity from any observations even in principle, which directly contradicts the assumption that you can find an explanation.